VAe CHRISTIAN 
' ADVENTURE ^ 

A. HERBERT GRAY 




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THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 



THE CHRISTIAN 
ADVENTURE 



A. HERBERT GRAY, MA., D.D. 

AUTHOR OF ^'AS TOMMY SEES US," ETC. 




ASSOCIATION PRESS 

New York : 347 Madison Avbnub 
1920 



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^> 



Copyright, 1920, by 

The International Committee op 

Young Men's Christian Associations 



mi -1 iy20 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF ABfBRICA 

©C!,A566875 



PREFACE 

There are no arguments about the truth o£ Christi- 
anity in this book. It is wholly concerned with the 
preliminary question, "What is Christianity ?" 

I have had uncounted discussions with men and 
women about the truth of Christianity, and in the 
vast proportion of them I have found that they were 
talking about one thing while I was talking about 
another. 

Sometimes I have found myself hoping devoutly 
that the thing which my interrogators called Chris- 
tianity could not be proved true. 

Therefore in these pages I have confined myself 
to an effort to present the message of Jesus as He 
gave it to the world. Within the limits set to me it 
has not been possible to do more than write a series 
of outlines, and I am painfully aware that no single 
topic has been adequately handled. 

Yet I hope that what I have written may at least 
suggest to some that Christianity embodies the one 
summons to men and women that is adequate to 
their humanity, and that it offers to the race the one 
hope of solving all the problems of civilization, 



VI 



PREFACE 



Once men and women have really accepted 
Christianity so conceived, it is my faith that they 
will very soon oifer to the world a demonstration of 
its truth beyond all challenge. 

A. H. G. 



d 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Preface v 

I. Jesus i 

II. What Was Jesus Doing ? 19 

III. Further Features of the Kingdom ... 35 

IV. Methods in the Kingdom 54 

V. Was That All?— The King 68 

VI. What Does He Want You to Do? . . • . 82 

VII. What About Human Nature? loi 

VIII. The Resoutices OF THE Disciple 116 



CHAPTER I 

JESUS 

The man who would understand Christianity must 
begin by understanding Jesus. Churches, creeds, 
and theologies are secondary affairs, however im- 
portant. No man can know whether or no Christi- 
anity offers him the great things which in his heart 
he wants until he has faced Jesus and come to know 
both what Jesus was, and what Jesus offers. 
Churches frequently make mistakes. Creeds are 
never more than partially successful attempts to 
state truths. But Jesus either was or was not the 
♦ embodiment of the essential secret of life, and while 
churches may come and go, and while creeds may 
change again and again, Christianity stands or falls 
by mankind's judgment on Him. 

His Selflessness. — Almost at a first glance Jesus 
presents us with a strange combination. On the 
one hand, He quietly assumed an absolute authority ; * 
and on the other. He was entirely without self- 
regard in the ordinary sense. He never sought any- 
thing for Himself, and was serene in spirit though 
He had no status in society, no certain means of 
livelihood, and no security for life itself. In most 
men, even though they be good men, there is an 
undercurrent of thought about self which every 



2 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

now and then becomes apparent. In Jesus no such 
thoughts appear. He gave Himself lavishly to 
others, and never seemed to stop to consider what 
the world might think of Him. He was so free 
from vanity that the opinion of men actually did not 
matter to Him. Such a thing as jealousy is un- 
thinkable in connection with Him. He did not 
plan out a career for Himself, and of what we call 
^ personal ambition there was no trace in all His life. 

He did indeed reveal to His disciples^ that once 
at the beginning of His public life He had a great 
struggle over this matter. At that point, when a 
full sense of His powers first came to Him, His 
human self made a very stubborn effort at self- 
assertion. He was racked and tossed for days on 
end by the familiar ambitions of great human 
spirits. The prospects of worldly dominion and of 
dazzling outward fame danced before His imagina- 
tion; and a fight, grim and lonely, had to be faced 
before He subdued self altogether. The fight may 
have been renewed in secret again and again in after 
days, but it never came to the surface. To on- 
lookers self seemed to be dead in Him altogether. 
He was content even to be despised, because He 
sought nothing for Himself. 

The ablest and most virile of men will best be 
able to realize how much that means. Ambition is 
the last infirmity of noble minds, because for them 
the great ambitions are possibilities. But the 

* It is obvious that the disciples can only have known about the 
Temptation because Jesus, for reasons of His own, for once broke 
through His reserve and told them that tremendous story of Hi« 
own inner life. 



JESUS 3 

noblest mind in history attained to a complete vic- 
tory over ambition. That meant a greater thing 
than laying down one's life in bodily death, and in 
that sense Jesus laid down His life at the very 
beginning. 

On the other hand, Jesus quietly made such an 
assumption of authority as the world had never 
heard of before. He declared that by their attitude 
to Himself men judged themselves. He claimed to 
speak for God, and that in Him Grod was perfectly 
revealed. He taught no doctrine about His own 
nature and person, but He consistently assumed that 
His coming was the central event of the world's 
history. To confess Him before the Father was to 
be sure of welcome— to deny Him was to court 
rejection. He crowned His claim by saying that 
those who had seen Him had seen God. And yet 
even in this most arresting and mysterious part of 
His life a real effort after self-obliteration is dis- 
cernible. 'T do nothing of myself.'' ''The Father 
that dwelleth in me he doeth the works." He was 
invariably anxious that men should look past Him 
to His Father. 

Both these features of Jesus arrest the heart and 
inspire trust. He seemed to His disciples to need 
no credentials except Himself. It was a later age 
that asked for proofs, and discussed the significance 
of miracles, and the circumstances of His birth, and 
the manner of His resurrection. His first disciples 
trusted Him because ''never man spake like this 
man." They were quite sure about Him simply 
because of what He was to their immediate vision. 



4 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

His Originality, — It will astonish those who 
have never really looked at Jesus but who only 
know the habitual atmosphere of churches to find 
that He was quite unlike the ordinary very religious 
man. He was not a preacher. He did indeed talk 
constantly about religion, because it was to Him 
the happiest and the most beautiful of all possible 
subjects of talk. But He talked spontaneously as 
occasion oifered, and there are no continuous dis- 
courses of Jesus.^ He seems not to have known 
any theological words. He avoided all those special 
terms which give hardness and edge to religious 
truth, and preferred to trust to impressions which 
were conveyed in stories and images. He was quite 
uninterested in ceremonial, and initiated no ritual 
or forms of worship except the very simple words 
used at the last supper. Above all He was not 
oppressively solemn. He kept no special tone of 
voice for speaking about God. He was not annoyed 
by the surface interests of life, which necessarily 
engross people so much. He never seems to have 
wished to quench laughter, or to have felt that the 
children of eternity should never be merry in time. 
He did not sit through festivities refraining for 
charity's sake from criticism. He was Himself 
happy in the joys of others, and it was characteristic 
of Him that once when a marriage feast was in 
danger of failure through the lack of wine, He took 
steps to remedy the lack. His presence heightened 

* The Sermon on the Mount is a collection of sayings compiled 
by the Evangelist. The Johannine discourses are not in form 
characteristic of Jesus at all. 



JESUS S 

joys, and those who had thought of religion as at- 
best a dull affair had to change their ideas in the 
company of Jesus. His own spirit played in such 
homely touch with real and familiar life, that He 
only just escapes definite and positive humour. He 
must have spoken much with a smile, and often 
must have made others smile — the sort of smile for 
which a man is the better at once. 

His Appreciativeness, — When we look closer 
into His ways we begin to see that one main secret 
of this strange fascination which He exercised over 
unspiritual and unchurchy people lay in the fact 
that it was His instinct and His habit to see first in 
any man or woman what could be appreciated — ^not 
what was open to criticism. Have you not felt 
about many quite good people that they have a 
terrible aptness in detecting what is indefensible in 
your life or character? Their kind but searching 
glances are very disconcerting. Though they are 
so good, it is hard to love them, and we escape from 
their company with relief. But the glances of 
Jesus were not disconcerting. He saw more good 
in men than they had suspected themselves. He 
saw in Zaccheus the possibility of a great and 
generous life; and once He had seen it Zaccheus 
saw it too, so that forthwith it sprang into being. 
He saw in Mary Magdalene a great woman, not yet 
spoiled beyond hope. And because He saw that 
great womanhood in her, she forthwith began to be 
a great woman. 

Tradition has it that once when He was leaving 
a village with His disciples He found a crowd at the 



6 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

gate gathered round the carcass of a dead mongrel 
dog. The others present were yying with one an- 
other in pointing out its repulsive features — its 
loathsome skin, its bleared eyes, its misshapen legs. 
But when Jesus had looked He said only this, 
'Tearls cannot equal the whiteness of his teeth." 
There is a world of meaning in that stor}\ What 
He saw was the one beautiful feature in the case. 
And He saw it first. He always saw it first, even 
in rakes, profligates, and misers. Criticism of 
human beings is, of course, the easiest thing in the 
world. A man need hardly be intelligent in order 
to detect what is wrong w^ith any given character. 
That popular hobby called pulling other people to 
pieces barely requires the use of the mind at all. 
To note one man's uncouth accent, and another's 
funny walk — to detect that this man is conceited, 
and that man dubiously honest — to discover that 
that girl is plain and that other one selfish — to label 
a whole year of freshers or seniors or a whole 
college staff with their appropriate faults — these 
things constitute a \ery rudimentary form of mental 
exercise. 

But to see in any man or woman what can be 
loved and valued is a very different business. And 
it was in that matter that Jesus was sublimely pro- 
ficient. He had the seeing eye which could detect 
that which is of God in any human personality. 
Therefore, of course. He was of immense help to all 
whom He met. I doubt whether any one of us was 
ever helped or profited by anybody who began by 
disapproving of us. But the people who appreciate 



JESUS 7 

us can do almost anything with us. And there lay 
Christ's power. Rough men and light women who 
were hardened to resist the scorn of the respectable 
felt constrained to say, "Why, this man values and 
likes us!'' And forthwith they began to respect 
themselves and to have a new hope in life. To have 
been appreciated by Jesus might well make any man 
hold up his head. 

Nor was this attitude on Christ's part in any way 
an affectation. I remember the time when I sup- 
posed that Jesus loved all men simply because He 
believed it to be His duty, and whether or no He 
found in them anything to be loved. The idea was, 
of course, grotesquely foolish. God Himself could 
not love what is essentially unlovable. No ! Jesus 
loved men and women because He could always find 
in them something worthy to be loved — some possi- 
bility at the worst which was a fit object even for 
Divine love. He could detect in each instance that 
which justified the declaration that man was made 
in the image of God. 

It is a fascinating exercise to try to use His 
method. I remember reviewing for this purpose a 
number of people of my acquaintance. I found 
that one man, whom I knew to be a drunkard, was 
also a very large-hearted and generous soul. An- 
other, of whom I knew that his business activities 
would scarcely stand scrutiny, was none the less a 
truly and loyally affectionate husband and father. 
A third, who has a notoriously vile temper, is also 
honest and reliable beyond most. Another still, 
who is one of the slaves of lust, is also brave and 



8 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

energetic and able. Another, who appeared mean 
and sly and cowardly, has none the less a soul that 
responds to beautiful music and can live at times in 
a very beautiful world. One woman, who flaunts a 
frivolous nature in the face of the world, can serve 
and slave like a heroine when trouble is in the air. 
Another, of whom it cannot be denied that she is 
vain, is also a most capable and valuable citizen. A 
third, who is exacting and fractious at times, is none 
the less capable of great acts of unselfishness. 
Several, who are most unattractively pious, are none 
the less really conscientious and consistent. Certain 
aggressive teetotallers turned out to be behind that 
forbidding exterior persons of real public spirit. 
Certain gaunt and stern spirits of the old school 
were yet honest with themselves and resolute in 
duty as few younger spirits are. Oh yes ! and in the 
army I have found drinkers and swearers and men 
of wild hooligan nature who could on occasion dis- 
play such qualities of courage, gentleness, and self- 
forgetfulness, as might well make most church 
members very humble. In connection with all these 
people to pay attention to what was obvious was 
to be repelled. But also with them all further 
search revealed things which not only can be loved, 
but which ought to be loved. And this was the in- 
stinctive manner of Jesus. 

Possibly there was even more meaning than I 
have suggested in His willingness to be the com- 
panion of outcasts — publicans and sinners, and so 
forth. In Jack London's great book, "John Barley- 
corn/' he confesses that he had always found him- 



JESUS 9 

self irresistibly drawn to the company of the sort 
of men who were to be found in saloons — those 
whom he calls the "big chesty men/' and that be- 
cause there was such volume and wealth of energy 
in them. He found them tremendously alive and 
direct. Whether they were good or bad, there was 
a strong hearty simplicity in them. If they were 
but raw material they were certainly genuine ma- 
terial. I believe Jesus felt the same fascination in 
the same sort of man. The rough, untutored, hearty 
men of Galilee appealed to His heart far more than 
the refined but conventional folk of Jerusalem, or 
the priests and Pharisees fashioned in the schools. 
He could get at the former because they were at 
least sincere. This at least is certain, that the men 
who felt awkward and out of place in churches, 
who were accustomed to speak with loud voices 
and in very plain language, who had learnt no con- 
ventions and acquired no polish, none the less found 
themselves quite at home with Jesus. Were there 
such an one as He now in the world, he could go 
into any army dining hall, into any stokehole, any 
shipyard, any common room, any lodging house, 
and his presence would not make men uncomfort- 
able. His coming would not be resented. And 
his second visit would be eagerly looked for. 

His Friendships. — ^We shall see further into His 
nature by thinking of His friendships. It would 
seem that He was always ready to begin a friend- 
ship. Zaccheus, who belonged to the same moral 
class as sweating employers, was no doubt a much 
detested man, deliberately shunned by both the 



10 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

respectable and the poor. Probably no man had 
made a friend of him for years. But Jesus no 
sooner knew him than He insisted on becoming his 
friend ; and though many houses were open to Him, 
it was to the house of the bete noir of Jericho that 
He insisted on going. Of Mary Magdalene no 
respectable man and no virtuous woman would ever 
have thought of making a friend. She was left to 
the company of those who did her no good. But 
for Jesus the fact that she needed a friend was final. 
I doubt if He even realized what the world might 
think. One thing only He saw, and that a lonely 
soul who needed the warm garment of friendship. 
And at once He wrapped her in it. She should 
know forthwith that one man had real friendship 
to give her. No wonder she turned for ever from 
those who could only traffic with lust, Bartimseus 
was to the ordinary traveller just a bit of flotsam by 
the shore of life's river — just something living 
within a bundle of dirty rags, to be sufficiently dealt 
with by a coin carelessly thrown, or a piece of food 
that could be spared. It seemed to the bystanders 
an affront that he should even wish to speak with 
Jesus. But Jesus saw in him only another possible 
friend, and what He did was just to make a friend 
of him, and so doing to make another man of him. 
And so it was always. He found His friends in 
no one class. He did not seek out congenial spirits. 
He never considered what He could get from a 
friendship. It was enough for Him always that a 
man or a woman needed a friend. It was His in- 
stinct and His passion to give, and to give lavishly, 



JESUS II 

of love and fellowship even to unattractive and 
twisted natures. He was that kind of man. 

But that was not all. Having given of His 
friendship, He was never willing to let a friend- 
ship end. He had the bitter experience of finding 
that His friends failed Him. Peter, the most 
demonstrative of them, passionately repudiated 
Him at a time of crisis. Thomas, the most dogged 
of them, bluntly doubted at a time when Jesus was 
longing to find belief. The whole band of His 
nearest and dearest ran away in panic at the worst 
hour of His life. Of such unstable friends many a 
man would say, "If that is all they care, I have no 
use for them.'* But Jesus having begun a friend- 
ship always refused to see it end. He sent a special 
and kindly message to Peter, calling him back. He 
gathered the eleven round Him, and though they 
must have been shamefaced at first, He insisted on 
restoring the old relations. He offered Thomas all 
the proof his cautious nature asked. He bridged 
the chasm they had made by the sheer fidelity of His 
own affection. He was proof even against cow- 
ardice and disloyalty. So He shows in His friend- 
ships — always ready to begin — never willing to 
leave off. 

As we know them, men are mostly touchy, ex- 
acting, and sometimes difficult even in friendship. 
Sometimes they are too absorbed in their own 
affairs to be of use to us. Sometimes they ask more 
than we can give. But with Jesus it was never so. 
He was always able to meet a friend's claims, and 
having loved He loved unto the end. 



12 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

And yet I do not think He was of those who do 
not need human love. Some strong men of good 
will seem always willing to give and to help, but 
never seem to be themselves in need. They never 
give their friends the chance to be of use. They 
never come in their turn for sympathy or seal a 
friendship by generous taking. I do not think Jesus 
was of that kind. When Peter in the folly of his 
impetuous love sought to restrain Jesus from the 
way of the cross, the very passion with which 
Jesus repulsed him seems to me proof that He too 
felt the power of human love, and knew the danger 
of allowing love to drag us down into that softer, 
warmer atmosphere where heroic things cannot be 
done. He was almost rude to Peter just because 
Peter's love had power with Him. No! He was 
not so independent of men that their desertions 
could not hurt Him. They rather made the hardest 
trial of His hardest hour. But His love was too 
big, too strong to be killed even by such blows. He 
was that kind of man. 

His Daring. — It is quite impossible to do justice 
in words to the courage of Jesus, but we can let the 
plain facts speak for themselves. Of all the other 
actors in the drama of His life it is reported at some 
point or other that they w^ere afraid. And in each 
case their fears made them play a mean part. The 
rich, for instance, were afraid of poverty, and there- 
fore could not deal honestly with the truths Jesus 
proclaimed. The priests feared for their own posi- 
tion, and therefore schemed to overthrow one whose 
teaching lessened their authority. The Pharisees 



JESUS 13 

feared the people, and therefore sought out under- 
hand ways of accomplishing their ends. The mob 
feared their rulers, and therefore would not stand 
by the man whom at times they had acclaimed with 
shouts. Pilate feared Caesar, and when he was met 
by vulgar threats that unfavourable reports might 
reach Rome, he succumbed and deliberately acted 
against his own convictions as a judge. And lastly, 
and most tragic of all, the disciples themselves hope- 
lessly gave way to panic at the critical hour, and 
stampeded away from the Lord whom they really 
loved. In all these cases we see men blatantly un- 
true to their own consciences, and openly resisting 
their own moral convictions. And the reason in 
every case was just fear — that most sinister of all 
the enemies of true manhood. 

Alone among them all Jesus was never afraid. 
From the very beginning of His public career He 
had to make decisions daily which practically made 
it certain that His life would be taken. He went 
abroad into the nation to declare certain great life- 
redeeming truths, but they were so obnoxious to 
those in authority, that very soon it became plain 
that they would not tolerate this new teacher. To 
go on, therefore, was really to pile the faggots for 
His own martyrdom. Yet daily He did it, and we 
never catch even a glimpse of the spectre of fear 
stealing in and out of His life. I cannot think that 
He v/as one of those rare men, of whom I have at 
least heard, who are said never to have known what 
the feeling of fear is. He was too human for that 
— too fully one of us. But He was of that chosen 



14 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

company who are able never to let fear come to the 
surface — who in spite of it go on and do their 
business in a cheerful spirit — who attain to complete 
spiritual mastery over it — who, therefore, never 
seem to be afraid. There were many members of 
that band at the front, men who may have had their 
bad hours in secret, but who never showed it — men 
who encouraged others by making the causes of 
fear seem contemptible. And they will best appre- 
ciate Jesus. He had to do daily exactly what men 
at the front did. He had to go on with a round of 
duty which must mean death, and therefore daily 
He had to lay down his life. And yet if you look 
closely at Him you will not see a grim and de- 
termined man, living as it were in the throes of 
a tragic wrestle with fate. Oh no! His victory 
over fear was far more complete than that. You 
will see a serene and happy spirit, who did not pay 
His enemies the compliment of being even perturbed 
by them and their plots. 

It may seem at a first glance that there could be 
almost nothing in common between Jesus — the 
Galilean peasant, the idealist martyr — and the 
modern British athlete, whose friends say of him 
with pride that he is "a good sport." But what is 
this all-important quality to which we apply the 
epithet "sporting"? It has not really any neces- 
sary connection with games. It has to be applied 
to men who couldn't run a hundred yards in twenty 
seconds, or hit a cricket ball to save their lives. It 
is the word we apply to men who meet life with a 
laugh and not a whine — who rather enjoy risks — 



JESUS 



IS 



who never go back on a friend, or fail to face the 
music — who may be very virtuous, but who at least 
have not chosen virtue merely because it is safe — 
who have a spirit that lifts them a little above life 
so that they are its masters and not its puppets. 

And that quality I do find in a supreme measure 
in Jesus. He holds my heart because I see Him 
quiet and strong and even happy amidst the risks 
and sufferings which make other men run for 
shelter. Though they killed His body He was 
always master of the situation — the one man whom 
His whole generation could not conquer, because 
they could not make Him afraid. 

And yet that is not the greatest thing that can be 
said about the courage of Jesus. He could do all 
that brave officers and privates have done in the 
way of taking bodily risks serenely, but He could 
also do what thousands of those contemporaries of 
ours are afraid to do — He could hold to convictions 
about truth and right which were utterly unpopular, 
and even when they made Him utterly lonely. 
Hundreds of the men who have won and deserved 
M.C.'s in this war, who could hold German bullets 
in honest contempt, were absolutely devoid of the 
kind of courage which would have been needed to 
stand to a conviction about social conduct, or 
politics, or personal goodness which was unpopular 
in their messes. The mere thought of being ticketed 
as ''pecuhar'' or ''cranky'' made them perspire with 
fear. They could not give their minds or their 
consciences free play. They were the abject slaves 
of public opinion. 



i6 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

If Jesus had been of that kind we should never 
have heard of Him. He passed His whole life in 
open defiance of public opinion. And He was 
spared nothing. He had at one time the support of 
the crowd, but they afterwards forsook Him. The 
important people of His time all declared against 
Him. He was made the victim of their ridicule. 
His own family even thought Him mad, and failed 
to stand by Him. Because of His convictions He 
found Himself becoming constantly more and more 
lonely, and though He had twelve intimate friends 
who seemed to believe in Him and trust Him, they 
too failed Him at the last. And all the while He 
was an affectionate and sociable nature. He longed 
for friends who would agree with Him, and support 
Him. He was no man of ice and steel who did not 
care what anybody thought, and could dispense with 
human affection without a pang. He was of the 
warm-hearted, large-hearted type. And yet not 
even utter loneliness could make Him afraid. Are 
any of us fit to be His friends? 

His Happiness. — And now let me speak of one 
last quality which we are only now in a position to 
appreciate. He was a happy man. Probably a 
great injustice has been done Him by the traditional 
title "Man of Sorrows.'' The great truth covered 
by that title is that He was always willing to share 
every human sorrow which He met. No child 
cried, and no woman wept, but Jesus was hurt by it. 
No strong men came to life's agonies without awak- 
ening the sympathy of Jesus. He involved Him- 
self in anything and in everything that hurt His 



JESUS 17 

brethren. And further, for His own part He had 
to go through the darkest and the deepest waters of 
human agony. In body and in mind He was tor- 
tured. Loneliness, opposition, slander, persecution, 
treachery, weariness, defeat, and rejection — He had 
to meet them all. While beyond them there were 
certain sublime and mysterious agonies of spirit to 
be faced, which we cannot fully understand, but 
which came to a head in Gethsemane, when His 
sweat was as it were drops of blood. All these 
truths are covered by the title "Man of Sorrows." 
But what that title does not suggest is the still 
greater fact that He conquered all those sorrows. 
He won a spiritual victory over them and emerged 
again into joy. He was too sure of God to remain 
under the power of woe. He lived habitually in the 
sunshine which surrounds those who know God. 
There is a permanent instinct in us which tells us 
that gloomy religion is religion that has failed. The 
gloomy man is a man whom we do not want to be 
like. He cannot have found the secret of life. He 
is under the heel of life, and if religion is a saving 
thing it must deliver men from the weight of this 
life's tragedies. In Jesus the deliverance was com- 
plete. Men wanted to be with Him because He 
possessed an infectious spirit of hope and joy. Men 
and women whom the pains of life had made cold, 
sunned themselves in his presence. 

And He enjoyed the joy of others. He liked to 
see people happy. He responded to the music of 
happy, honest laughter. 

A man's power of joy depends ultimately upon 



i8 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

his whole view of life and eternity. As Chesterton 
has said, we cannot in the end rejoice in anything 
less than the whole scheme of things. The pro- 
foundest truths which theology has ever tried to 
handle are involved in the issue as to whether life 
can be happy. In the last resort it depends upon 
God, and upon the kind of God He is, whether we 
can rejoice. But Jesus was quite sure of God — 
quite sure that the best we can think or imagine 
about Him is not so good as the reality. He ex- 
hausted Himself in finding words and similes to 
suggest the greatness and the splendour of God, and 
seems to have felt that He had never managed to 
convey the truth. Of course He was a happy man. 
And He holds the supreme secret for all who want 
to be happy. 

These thoughts make the merest beginning for 
any one who wants to know what Jesus was, and 
they are offered only as evidence that the subject is 
worth pursuing. But as I end this chapter I want 
to repeat what I implied to begin with. He who 
wants to come to a true and just conclusion con- 
cerning Christianity must begin by knowing and 
realizing this Jesus. This is the leader who asks 
for our allegiance. This is the man whom Chris- 
tians claim to be a perfect embodiment of the truth 
about God. Till we really know what He was, we 
can come to no just judgment concerning the 
religion that is called by His name. We may know 
churches and creeds and Christians and still go 
utterly wrong in deciding about Christianity. We 
must know Jesus Himself. 



CHAPTER II 

WHAT WAS JESUS DOING? 

So far we have considered in a measure what Jesus 
was, but we cannot know Him till we also ask: 
*'What was He doing? What was the central pur- 
pose of His life?'' Mark's answer to that question 
is contained in the words, ''J^^^s came preaching 
the gospel of the Kingdom of God." His char- 
acteristic announcement was "The Kingdom of 
Heaven is at hand." 

Plainly, then, we cannot understand either Him 
or His work until we know what He meant by the 
Kingdom of God. It is one of the most astonish- 
ing things in all Christian history that until recently 
so little attention was paid to the meaning of that 
expression, and such an infinite amount to certain 
metaphysical and theological mysteries about which 
Jesus Himself said nothing. It would be possible 
to be quite well informed about the theologies of 
many past centuries, and yet not to know v/hat the 
Kingdom of God means. On the other hand, it 
may turn out that if vv^e can grasp what He meant 
by it we may understand Jesus and the religion 
He has given us without disturbing ourselves over 
theological mysteries at all. 

19 



20 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

It may be doubted whether two per cent, of the 
people who attend churches have any clear concep- 
tion of the meaning of this phrase which was so 
constantly on the lips of Jesus. It might have been 
expected that it would have been the very first thing 
to be explained to children in connection with Chris- 
tianity, and that church members would receive 
abundant instruction about it. It would have been 
natural if it had filled a central place in catechisms, 
and in confessions of faith. But as a matter of 
fact, it hardly has any place at all in creeds, or 
catechisms. A man might read a great deal of 
ordinary Christian literature and never come across 
the expression. 

Now thousands of people are asking today why 
it is that Christianity seems in large measure to have 
failed. If it is all that Christians claim it to be — 
if it contains the secret of the world's peace and 
well-being, and if it has the power of God behind 
it — surely it should have saved us from this present 
debacle. Nineteen centuries make up a long time, 
and after all that time of opportunity Christianity 
still often seems a very weak and ineffectual thing. 
Christians often seem a weak and negligible quan- 
tity. They could not prevent the war. They have 
not been able to persuade the world to a Christian 
settlement after the war. If they hold the secret 
of the world's peace and well-being they have been 
singularly unsuccessful in applying it. 

But what if our common Christianity is in some 
essential respects different from Christ's Christi- 
anity! What if in His name we have been pro- 



WHAT WAS JESUS DOING? 21 

claiming something less and even something differ- 
ent from the Gospel of the Kingdom of God ! That 
would at least explain the disconcerting facts of 
today. It may be that He had the secret and that 
we have not had it. It may be that from very early 
times we have taken from Him so much less than 
He meant to give that the religion we have pro- 
fessed and practised is actually a religion without 
power. 

It may be ; and at all events the possibility ought 
to send us back to the gospels with a new determina- 
tion to find out what actually was the authentic 
Gospel of the Kingdom of God, which occupied all 
the attention of Christ Himself. What, then, did 
Jesus mean by the Kingdom of God? I think a 
partial answer at least is to say that He used that 
phrase as a description of what human life becomes 
when it is lived under the constraint of two truths — 
the Fatherhood of God, and the Brotherhood of 
man. Those were the two great truths He came to 
reveal both by life and by death, and when any man 
fully receives them and lives under their dominion 
he enters the Kingdom. When any group of people 
live in that way then the Kingdom appears as a 
social fact in this life. 

Another way in which Jesus put the same truth 
was to say that there are only two great command- 
ments — to love God and to love one's neighbour. 
And when any man begins to obey those command- 
ments he enters the Kingdom. The Kingdom means 
human life dominated through and through by love. 
To a certain extent the Kingdom comes into being 



22 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

when even one man achieves that kind of life. It 
began to come when Jesus Himself came, and in- 
dividuals can realize many of its blessings in their 
own lives even though they are isolated individuals. 
And yet the Kingdom cannot fully come for any 
individual until others also have entered it. It is 
essentially a social thing. It means a society of a 
certain kind. Indeed, it cannot fully come until all 
men have entered it, and life the wide world over is 
life dominated by its principles. 

And Jesus came to set up that kind of society. 
He came to substitute His Kingdom for all the king- 
doms of the world. He came to a world very weary 
and very sad. Mazzini says of it: 'Throughout 
the world was a dull sound of dissolution. All 
trembled ; the heavens and the earth. . . . The soul 
of man had fled; the senses reigned alone. . . . 
Philosophy had sunk first into scepticism, then into 
epicureanism, then into subtlety and words. Poetry 
was transformed into satire." 

All the social evils with which we are familiar 
were rampant in it, and others even more tragic. It 
was a cruel and a hard world, in which plainly life 
had gone wrong. Civilization itself seemed in 
acute danger, and many good people were so filled 
with despair that not infrequently they left the 
world by their own act. But Jesus did not despair. 
He said in effect, *'Let us set up another Kingdom 
on quite other principles: let us begin to conform 
life to the mind of God. Let us turn the existing 
world upside down." His words were not the 
wild and windy words of a mere fanatic or dreamer. 



WHAT WAS JESUS DOING? 23 

He spoke with a calm assurance. He not only 
called on men to build that Kingdom: He declared 
it was at hand. He was not dismayed by the might 
of Imperial Rome, nor by all the battalions of the 
hosts of Mammon. Though outwardly a mere 
peasant without worldly experience, He lived 
habitually amidst these tremendous conceptions and 
looked out across the whole world with the eye of a 
conqueror. He dared to entertain the most im- 
perial designs which any human mind has ever 
harboured. And all that because this project of 
the Kingdom was not with Him like a politician's 
programme. It was a "Gospel." He knew it to be 
the will of God, and He believed it must come be- 
cause the power of God was behind it. He had 
good news for men — even the good news that all 
this present reign of evil might and would end so 
soon as men turned to God and accepted His will. 
He knew that His own presence in the world was 
the beginning of the Kingdom; and He was Him- 
self so constantly aware of the power of God that 
for Him it was a matter of immediate certainty that 
if only men would let God into their lives the build- 
ing of the Kingdom was certain to follow. There 
was no hint of arrogance in His imperialism. "I 
can of mine own self do nothing" was a character- 
istic saying of His. He could preach the Gospel 
of the Kingdom only because He was a soul steeped 
in God. In that sense the message of Jesus was not 
either a political or a social message, but a religious 
message. 

And yet it is very important to realize that this 



^4 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

Gospel which Jesus proclaimed does meet to the full 
the demand which is so divinely strong in thousands 
of hearts today — namely, the demand for a changed 
world. Thousands of young men and women are 
positively impatient today when it is suggested to 
them that they should be concerned about their own 
souls. They don't as yet care about their souls. 
But they do care, and care intensely, about the 
blatant evils of our day, and all those forces of 
injustice in our world whereby millions of human 
lives are thwarted, maimed, and spoilt. The in- 
sistent challenge of the wrongs of men and women 
who are chained and stunted by a cruel system of 
industry, who are denied health and joy by the very 
conditions of their lives, who are at times almost 
maddened by impulses towards a fuller life which 
can find no expression, who are crucified by a re- 
lentless social order— that challenge bulks so much 
more in many lives than any thought of personal 
salvation, that the old evangelistic message about 
the way to save one's soul is positively irritating to 
some. Thousands of such people are actually 
annoyed and irritated by much that they hear in 
churches. It would seem to them a petty thing to 
be worrying about their souls while men, women, 
and little children are being so abused. They think 
conventional religion a selfish thing. It might, of 
course, be pointed out to such people that many 
of the great evangelicals have also been among the 
greatest of the servants of distressed humanity, and 
that where evangelicalism is pure it creates public 
spirited persons. They will also probably find out 



WHAT WAS JESUS DOING? 25 

for themselves in time that if they are really to help 
they themselves must be changed. But to begin 
with, it is most important that we should realize 
that the message of Jesus was in its essence a 
message about the way to change the world. At the 
very beginning of His public ministry, He once 
expanded the Gospel of the Kingdom by uttering 
w^hat modern language would call a manifesto. 
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me: for he has 
consecrated me to preach the gospel to the poor, 
he has sent me to proclaim release for captives and 
recovery of sight for the blind, to set free the op- 
pressed, to proclaim the Lord's year of favour" 
(Luke iv. 18-19, Moffatt's translation). All that 
was involved in the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. 
The designs of Jesus included all that the most 
tender heart could desire, and all that the boldest 
modern reformer could demand. What He lived 
for was to bring full life and full liberty to every 
child of God. 

It was not in fact an individual salvation which 
He preached. He did not come simply to save in- 
dividuals out of the world. He came to make cer- 
tain a new heavens and a new earth. And the 
individual can never know the full joy of the King- 
dom so long as there remains one soul outside it, 
or one evil custom which wounds human lives. 

There are thousands of would-be reformers in 
the world today moved by sincere and holy passion. 
Yet most of them are ineffective, and many of them 
are hopelessly perplexed. What they need is a real 
leader with an inspired plan of action. They are 



26 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

waiting for some one to show thenx the real way 
forward. They are really waiting for Jesus though 
they may not know it. He alone can lead in this 
matter. He alone can show men how to get the 
power they need. 

The Conditions of Entrance. — ^Let us ask, then, 
what Jesus has to say to any one who wants to help 
in bringing in the Kingdom. He expresses that by 
saying that they must first of all see the Kingdom 
themselves, or that they must enter it themselves; 
and when we ask what are the conditions of 
entrance we get a very astonishing answer. 

"If any man will come after me let him deny 
himself and take up his cross daily. . . . He that 
loveth his life shall lose it, but he that loseth his 
life shall find it.'' "If any man come to me and 
hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and chil- 
dren and brethren and sisters, yea and his own life 
also, he cannot be my disciple." 

This thought comes over and over again in His 
teaching. He demanded of men a surrender abso- 
lutely complete. He had no place in the band of 
His followers for the man who looked back, or who 
was willing to give only a part of himself. At the 
very threshold of the Kingdom stands this call for 
utter self-renunciation. For any man or woman 
who is thinking of dealing with Jesus, here is the 
first matter of vital moment. We must understand 
Him here or we shall go utterly wrong. What does 
He mean ? 

Surely He means just this — that if a man would 
enter the Kingdom his object in life must no longer 



WHAT WAS JESUS DOING? 27 

be himself in any sense. He must no longer aim at 
his own advancement or his own profit. He must 
not live for his own career or his own comfort of 
his own fame and power. His purpose must cease 
to be his own establishment in ease or safety; he 
must be done with ''getting on in life." And in 
place of these almost universal and extremely 
natural aims, he must put the one aim of helping 
the coming of the Kingdom of God. The selfless- 
ness which was so perfect in Himself He asks of 
all who would follow and help Him. Being a 
Christian is not something a man can add on to 
life. It cannot be one of many interests in a life. 
It can only be the one supreme and dominating 
thing. Perhaps no leader ever made such uncom- 
promising demands of his followers. 

No doubt, as they come to understand w^hat He 
asked, many will say it is too much. ''Why," they 
will say, "if we are thus to let go all our natural 
ambitions, and surrender the plans we have made 
for our lives — if we are no longer to try to get 
the things which we want to get, we might as well 
die." And Jesus does not dispute that view of the 
case. He deliberately says a man must die to enter 
the Kingdom, only He insists that such dying turns 
out to be in the long run the only real way into life 
— ^life full, and happy, and effective. It is not 
simply what we call sins which a man must sur- 
render. It is his whole life so far as he has planned 
it for the advantage of self. Just as a soldier says, 
"I must serve my nation, and never mind what be- 
comes of me," so a member of Christ's band must 



28 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

say, "I must serve the Kingdom, and never mind 
what becomes of myself." Sooner or later each 
man or woman who thus accepts Christ's terms will 
come to know what his or her "bit" must be. And 
if in the doing of that bit he or she should allow 
thoughts of self and ease to interfere with effi- 
ciency, then that man or woman is unworthy of 
Christ. 

When this great transformation takes place in a 
man's life he is often said to be converted. And 
this is the only genuine and true form of conversion. 
Whatever spiritual experiences a man may have 
gone through, if he is not delivered from his self- 
regarding impulses, then he is not converted to the 
Christian position. About this point it is well that 
we should all be perfectly clear. We may refuse 
to think seriously of any such surrender of self. 
We may hold it absurd that anything so extreme 
should be asked. We may point blank refuse. But 
we cannot explain away the fact that that is what 
Christ asks. We may take it or leave it, but we 
cannot be Christians on any other terms. 

The End of Ordinary Ambitions. — And now let 
us notice what will happen so soon as the great sur- 
render has been achieved. The first result is that 
the ordinary ambitions which excite and embitter 
men are cut at the root. The love of money, the 
love of power, the love of status, the desire to over- 
ride other men, one and all wither so soon as a man 
has become delivered from self. A man will, of 
course, always need sustenance for himself and his 
family. As Jesus put it, "Our Heavenly Father 



WHAT WAS JESUS DOING? 29 

knoweth that we have need of such things." But in 
a just world that sustenance will always be secure 
to any honest servant, and the eye of a disciple will 
not be fixed upon that, but upon the service he can 
render humanity ; or in other words, upon what he 
can do to bring in the Kingdom. There may seem 
sometimes to be little outward difference between 
two busy business or professional men, one of 
whom is working for money, and the other of whom 
is working for society. But morally they are poles 
apart. They hardly belong to the same world. 
The difference between their spiritual attitudes is 
enormous. 

So soon, however, as the ordinary ambitions are 
exorcised from the spirit of man, wonderful con- 
sequences appear. It turns out that in that way the 
giant evils of the world receive a death blow. Con- 
sider such familiar evils as sweating, overwork, bad 
housing, and congested urban areas. The real root 
from which all these giant social weeds have grown 
is the root of avarice. Because some one, some- 
where, and at some point was over-anxious to make 
money these things appeared. In each case some 
one has considered personal money gain before the 
rights of other individuals. Some one has been 
trying to get too much work for the wage he paid, 
or to put too many people to live on the land he was 
going to let, or to give too little in healthy house 
room for the rent he was going to charge. But in a 
society where the members had been brought to put 
the common good before personal gain, none of 
these things could occur. A servant of the King- 



30 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

dom would rather be very poor himself, than take 
the life energy of another on starvation terms. 

Or, again, consider war. The real cause whence 
come wars is often just the same lust after gold. It 
is this which sets rival nations by the ears. They 
come into conflict often over matters concerned 
with commercial gain. They clash because they 
want to override each other and not to serve each 
other. Or it may be that they clash because they 
are alike animated by the lust for power — ^because 
they have made a national policy of the impulse to 
dominate others. And so long as there are in one 
world two nations pursuing that policy, war with 
its horrors is an inevitable result. But so soon as 
men put service before self the lust for power dies 
an inevitable death. No man lusting after power 
can live on terms of sympathy with Jesus. All who 
enter His Kingdom on His terms become at once 
forces that tend to prevent wars. 

Or, consider, again, a more personal evil — 
namely impurity. It has played havoc with every 
civilization, and has been ravaging ours of late. 
And its roots lie in the same instinct that makes a 
man put self-gratification before consideration for 
others. The man who takes her all from a woman 
without giving his all in return, or the woman who 
tempts a man to the loss of his chastity, is really 
consenting to use another personality as the mere 
instrument of pleasure, and taking what he or she 
holds to be gain at the expense of loss to others. 
Such action is rooted in a self-regard from which 
^ surrendered spirit is for ever free. No man 



WHAT WAS JESUS DOING? 31 

whose life interest is an interest in service can 
possibly traffic in such pleasures. A world with- 
out prostitution in it would be so infinitely healthier, 
happier, and more wholesome than this world, that 
many hold it to be an impossibility. But it comes 
definitely nearer with every man who enters the 
Kingdom on Christ's terms, and will come into 
complete being so soon as the race becomes wise 
enough to recognize Jesus as the Lord of Life. I 
might easily go on to speak of other evils, but it is 
unnecessary. Any one who thinks will find that a 
Kingdom based upon the self -surrender of all its 
Citizens would be a Kingdom from which all the 
old familiar evils of the world would disappear. 

I have no sympathy with those who on sup- 
posedly Christian grounds disparage efforts to 
secure legislation to end sweating, or to secure good 
houses for all, or to protect girls and to restrain the 
sensualist. It is quite possible that in a new sense 
the law (or in this case laws) may prove a school- 
master to bring us to Christ. But I do think it very 
well worth while that we should pause here just for 
a moment to realize that the one really effective way 
of dealing with all the world's evils, is the way of 
Jesus. You may induce a man to believe many 
doctrines, and still he may go on fostering social 
evils and profiting by them. You may induce men 
to join organized churches, and afterwards find 
them very busy in profiteering, and in commercial 
oppression. But when a man enters the Kingdom 
of God on the terms made plain by Christ, all that 
ends at once. He has no further interest in self- 



32 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

assertion. He becomes at once a force for the pro- 
tection and help of others. Kingdom Christianity 
is the sole real remedy for social, national, and 
international evils. 

Self -Surrender Is Not Life-Surrender, — Having 
looked squarely at the first demand of Jesus, for 
utter self -surrender, it becomes immediately most 
important to realize that there was involved in it 
no tendency towards narrow living, or any of that 
suspicious attitude towards a full life which is com- 
mon in many religious circles. We shall not get at 
the real purpose of Jesus until we put side by side 
His call for self -surrender, and His declaration, "I 
am come that ye might have life, and that ye might 
have it more abundantly.'' It was indeed just life 
that Jesus wanted to give men. To His vision their 
actual life was a poor and mean affair — a sorry 
scrambling amidst things of little worth, while the 
real wealth of existence of which they were capable 
was unrealized. They were scraping in the dust 
for gold, wallowing in a surfeit of sense pleasures, 
and trampling on each other in the process, while 
all the while He knew they might one and all have 
been living full and free lives, in touch with beauty, 
and tuned to divine harmonies. 

No one can read Christ's life honestly and make 
any mistake about His interest in whatever was 
normal and wholesome in human life. He knew 
all about the lives of farmers, and fishermen, and 
traders. He was interested in family life, and 
marriage, and felt to the full the charm of children. 
He enjoyed Himself in the society of full-blooded, 



WHAT WAS JESUS DOING? 33 

warm-hearted people. He had plainly worshipped 
the Father much by reading in the book of nature. 
He was most at home in the open clean country. 
He had marked the beauty of flowers, felt the won- 
der of the mystery of growth, and enjoyed the sun- 
shine and the rain. He was of the family of all 
those for whom this wonderful, many-sided, varied, 
and splendid thing which we call life is a source of 
unending joy and fascination. There is something 
cold and forbidding in all asceticism. It involves 
always a covert reproach to Him who designed our 
humanity. He would, indeed, be a strange God who 
should first make man capable of a thousand varied 
activities and then call upon him to exercise only 
two or three of them. But Jesus was so wholly 
free from asceticism that those who had not under- 
stood Him actually reproached Him as a gluttonous 
man and a wine-bibber. He was too great to be a 
John the Baptist who was at home in the desert. 
Jesus could only be at home in the midst of ordinary 
many-sided life. 

What, then, of this call to self-denial ! Well, it 
was a call to self-surrender, but not a call to world 
renunciation. Men and women were to go on liv- 
ing in the world, and were to continue to exercise 
their gifts and talents there, only all now with a 
new motive. They were to be busy not for self but 
for all men. The statesman was to be busy, not 
that he might rise to some supreme place of power, 
but that national affairs might be well administered. 
The fisherman was to catch fish, not that he might 
make a corner in the fish market and so become 



34 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

rich, but that the people might have fresh and 
wholesome food. The bootmaker was to work 
hard, not for the utmost possible profit, but that the 
rest of men might have the best possible boots at 
the cheapest possible price. The trader was to go 
on with his business and put all his brains into it, 
not that he might make a pile and retire early into 
idleness, but that he might help the free exchange of 
the world's goods, and bring ease to lives that were 
straitened. The musician was to go on making 
music, and the best music he could — not for the 
highest possible fees, but that he might bring a 
worthy joy into the greatest possible number of 
lives. The physician was to be busier than ever, 
but with a passion for health, and not with a 
covetous eye on guineas. In fact, the self-regard- 
ing element was to pass out of every life, and so 
each life was to be set free to become something 
finer and larger and happier. He was giving men 
the secret of life, when He called them to give it up. 
It does in literal fact turn out to be true, that he who 
loseth his life shall find it, and none but those who 
have so lost life can ever imagine what a great and 
satisfying and romantic thing life may be through 
all its course. 

It was this that He was thinking of when He 
uttered His well-known promise: "All things shall 
be added unto you.'' So they are in literal fact. 
And the truly wealthy man — the man who has truly 
found well being — is always a man who has first 
laid down his life and all his selfish ambitions, 



CHAPTER III 

FURTHER FEATURES OF THE KINGDOM 

We shall get further light on the nature of the 
Kingdom of God, if we now approach it from a 
different angle. It is a Kingdom in which men 
have not only got rid of self-regard, but in which 
they take seriously the brotherhood of man. The 
phrase which Jesus instinctively used to describe 
another man was always "Thy brother.'' It was 
for Him one and the same thing to teach men that 
God was their Father and to teach that all of them 
were brethren. His own attitude was really well 
described by saying, "He was not ashamed to call 
them brethren.'' 

But while it is the case that the two truths — the 
Fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man — 
are really one and the same truth looked at from 
different sides, it is not true that men inevitably re- 
ceive them together. It is a congenial thing to 
most people to believe that God is their Father, and 
often it is a very uncongenial thing to believe that 
all other men are their brethren. It is possible to 
have a great deal of emotional pleasure in the fact 
that we have a Father in heaven who loves us, and 

35 



36 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

yet at the same time to deny in thought and action 
our brotherhood with other classes and races than 
our own. 

The brotherhood of man in fact turns out to be 
of all truths the most revolutionary, and for the 
drastic changes which would come with its recogni- 
tion many devout persons are not at all ready. For 
the Jews of Christ's time mankind consisted of two 
utterly different groups — Jews, who were the 
favoured of God, and Gentiles, who were outsiders. 
For the Greeks the two groups were Greeks, and all 
the others — comprehensively labelled "barbarians." 
For Romans, the groups were Roman citizens, and 
the rest. Further, all over the world men were 
divided into the free and the slaves, and so different 
was the status of the two groups that they were 
hardly held to be all alike human. Within the 
Jewish state there were the Scribes and Pharisees, 
and "the people'' often called "accurst." When 
Jesus called on men to believe in the brotherhood of 
man. He was asking the race to be done with these 
artificial distinctions. And in so far as the world 
understood Him it simply gasped, and then dis- 
missed Him as a dreamer. 

That is what men have done ever since even in 
the countries called Christian. Most of us still be- 
lieve, not by any deliberate mental process, but by 
inherited instinct, in numberless race and class 
distinctions which deny brotherhood. There are 
British people, and "foreigners" for whom we are a 
little sorry. There are white men, and black men 
whose destiny it is to be ruled by the whites and who 



FEATURES OF THE KINGDOM 37 

are hardly in the same sense human. There arc 
county families and the ''other people/' most of 
whom, poor souls, are "rather bounders." There 
are professional men, and tradesmen, "many of 
them, you know, wonderfully decent chaps !'* There 
are "the best people,'* who often cling to the title 
in spite of a minimum outfit of morals; and there 
are "the others'' to whom one need hardly be 
polite. There are Church folk who have on them 
the hall mark of an aristocratic institution, and 
Dissenters who are so ignorant and demonstrative 
even in their religion. There are skilled trades- 
men, and common labourers, who are often treated 
as scum. There are the respectable, and the 
fallen — the well-to-do, and the failures — the people 
in society, and the people outside of it— -the edu- 
cated who are sometimes educated in most things 
except true courtesy, and the ignorant — gentlemen, 
and bounders — ladies, and "women" — public school 
men, and all the rest — "bloods," and commoners, 
etc., through all the vast list of human social 
vagaries which must so amuse and weary our pa- 
tient and generous common Father. 

Now when Jesus announced the Kingdom of 
God He was really saying, "Let us be done once 
and for all with all these follies, some of which are 
cruel, and all of which are based upon a lie." "All 
ye are brethren," He said, and it follows that the 
true life of mankind can only be based upon a full 
and generous recognition of the fact. Those who 
would enter the Kingdom must be prepared to let 
go their race prejudices, and their social prejudices, 



38 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

and all their familiar and inherited forms of pride. 
Many of us will have to be born again, and born 
different, before that will be possible with us ; but 
then, as v/e have seen, a man who enters the King- 
dom must be born again. Patronage will not meet 
the demand made of us here. Neither will phil- 
anthropy. You do not patronize a brother or deal 
with him by way of charity. You treat him as one 
of the family, and share your life with him. Noth- 
ing short of that will satisfy Christ's demands. You 
are to give your brother not your money or your 
pity, but yourself. You are to learn to the full the 
art of brotherhood towards him. 

And this as we begin to be serious with it turns 
out to involve a multitude of things that used to 
seem unheard of. If all men are my brothers, then 
I must be content to let my life become involved 
with theirs. I cannot isolate myself either from 
their sorrows or their wrongs. What hurts them 
must hurt me. I cannot enjoy security while they 
are insecure, nor comfort and plenty while they are 
in pain and need. 

Vast vistas open up here which can really only 
be touched on in the slightest way at this point. 
It is here in fact that the social and political impli- 
cates of living according to the principles of the 
Kingdom begin to appear. Let me indicate only 
a few. 

Industry. — There is at present in being nearly 
all over the world a system of industry according 
to which the many are exploited for the gain of the 
few. Under that system the wage-earner sells his 



FEATURES OF THE KINGDOM 39 

labour for as much as he can get, and thereafter 
has very little control over his life. He works at 
another's bidding and for another's profit. Within 
the factory, or yard, or shop where he labours his 
place is very nearly that of a machine. No call is 
made upon him for the exercise of many of his 
finer powers. He does not hold a responsible office. 
His life is one of mechanical routine which tends 
actually to dull and impair the soul. Even when 
he is neither overworked nor underpaid, he is not 
given a status which corresponds with his true 
dignity as a son of God. In that industrial world 
he is not a citizen but a convenience. That is really 
why all over the world the men in the ranks of 
labour are in revolt. Their immediate demands 
may at times seem unreasonable. The reasons they 
give for their violent tactics may seem insufficient. 
But below all that heaving mass of discontent what 
is really happening is just that men made in the 
image of God are in revolt against a system that 
denies them the opportunity of a full human life. 
The explanation of labour unrest is really souls in 
revolt. Now no citizen of the Kingdom can accept 
such a system for his brethren. He may not know 
how exactly it is to be changed, nor what different 
organization of industry is to supersede it. But a 
system that does such despite to his brethren he 
cannot accept. Kingdom Christianity demands 
something drastically different. 

Housing. — In exactly the same way the citizen 
of the Kingdom will find himself involved in the 
housing question. The houses in which a vast 



40 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

number of people live in this country are such as to 
deprive them of the possibility of a full human life. 
They are fatal to real health, fatal to quiet, almost 
fatal to cleanliness. They make a mother's task too 
hard for even the strongest of women. They rob 
fathers of a real resting place in the evenings. They 
provide no opportunity of social intercourse for the 
young. In many cases they make even decency 
cruelly difficult. Christ's people cannot accept them 
for any portion of God's family. Building the 
Kingdom must mean rebuilding a vast proportion of 
the houses of Great Britain. 

Education. — Equally inevitable is it that dis- 
ciples of Christ will find themselves bound over to 
an interest in the matter of education. Christ's own 
aim for men and for all men was fullness of life. 
And fullness of life means adequate education. 
Not such education as we have at present, which 
tends to deal with children in crowds and so to 
impose one pattern on their plastic natures, but an 
education which shall really draw out all the latent 
powers in each personality, and so introduce them 
to real life. 

Health, — So also in the matter of health. Full 
life means health. All that destroys health is 
destroying the human careers of men and women. 
A disciple of the Kingdom will therefore find him- 
self compelled to accept the challenge of whatso- 
ever destroys health. He will be concerned not 
only with remedial measures such as hospitals. He 
will care about town planning, and the national 
supply of water and good food. He will not think 



FEATURES OF THE KINGDOM 41 

the smoke nuisance a little thing. He will probably 
come to think the drink evil a monstrous thing. At 
point after point he will find himself constrained 
to be a rebel against things as they are. It may well 
turn out that he can only touch the evils which con- 
front him at some one point, and that only in a very 
partial and half-successful way. But he will have 
a heart in sympathy with all everywhere who are 
putting forth devoted hands to set his brethren free 
from anything that now hampers their life. 

Amusements. — And here a thought about amuse- 
ments may well be expressed. I conceive that a 
man who really cares about his brethren will wish 
that they should have that amount of pure amuse- 
ment which our human constitution demands. But 
he will not wish to see any man or any woman set 
to perform a task for the amusement of others 
which he would not be willing to perform himself. 
In general, he will not consent to pay any man to do 
anything which he would not be willing to do him- 
self. And the particular application of that thought 
to amusements is that he will not pay to see any one 
do anything which he could not do himself without 
loss of dignity or self-respect. 

Inequalities of Income. — Behind these a still 
more difficult question insists upon obtruding itself. 
Will a man who really lives out a belief in brother- 
hood find that he can accept the inequalities of 
income which are such a glaring feature of our 
present social and economic order? Probably most 
people will answer "No ! We must work for such a 
readjustment as shall give to all men and women 



42 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

at least a chance of real self-realization, and to that 
end we must see to it that the fruits of civilization 
are at least more equally divided/' Perhaps that is 
all the answer that need be suggested here. The 
members of the Kingdom are all of them people 
who have escaped from any avaricious desire to 
make money: if they find themselves in a higher 
degree of comfort than is possible to the majority 
just now, they may satisfy themselves by making 
sure that they use their comfort to increase their 
efficiency and not to clog their energies. It may 
be enough to meet the demand of Christ if they 
watch with vigilance lest any undue desire to keep 
what they have got should aflfect their thinking 
about political and social issues, or their conduct in 
life's affairs generally. Christ never said dogmatic- 
ally that His followers must be poor. He only 
implied in all that He said that they must be willing 
to be poor, if in that way they can help the coming 
of the Kingdom. There is no necessary virtue in a 
meagre manner of existence, and sordid ways of 
living always lessen the real value of life. It is 
even quite possible that a man might lose some of 
his power to lift by first going down voluntarily to 
that low level of material existence from which he 
wishes to raise all men. Perhaps in this connection 
the real question a man must face is whether he is 
using his advantages merely for self, or for the 
cause of the Kingdom. 

And yet when all this has been said, there will, 
I think, always remain some who are not satisfied — 
some who are troubled by incomes of £500 a year 



FEATURES OF THE KINGDOM 43 

and upwards, even though they be well earned. 
They will not suggest that there is anything wrong 
in such an income itself. They may even wish that 
all men could have iiooo a year. But they will 
question the reality of their brotherly spirit so long 
as they themselves have so much more than the 
majority of their brethren. Some of them will ac- 
cept voluntary poverty with all its disadvantages 
just in order that they may get nearer to their 
brethren. And it may well be that there is a great 
part to be played in bringing in the Kingdom by 
such people. The Kingdom is not based upon 
material poverty, but just because it is very hard 
to build, it may well be that those who have become 
poor for Christ's sake will alone have power for 
some of the specially hard parts of the work. 

Coloured Races. — Passing from that difficult 
point we must stay a moment to realize what 
brotherhood means in relation to the races of Asia 
and Africa. Few dividing walls prove so strong 
and high as the colour wall. Not a few good and 
generous souls have found themselves unable to 
subdue a certain obstinate instinct of distaste when 
brought into intimate contact with people on the 
other side of that wall. Easterns probably have 
that experience in relation to Westerns, and many 
Westerns have it in their turn. The instinctive atti- 
tude of the efficient Briton towards such people is 
apt to be at best one of kindly domination. He 
does not really feel that Chinese, Indians, and 
Africans belong to the same race as himself. He 
can bear with them so long as they are merely 



44 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

labourers. When they aspire to share the profes- 
sions, or to cooperate in government, he is apt to 
be indignant. In fact, it is rooted in his very being 
that such people are not his equals and never can be. 

But when Christ said that God is the Father of 
all men, He meant all men. When He called on 
those who would follow Him to recognize others as 
their brethren. He made no exception in the case of 
coloured men. When He forbade us to call any 
man common or unclean, He was laying down an 
absolute rule. When He commissioned His people 
to preach the Gospel to every creature, He meant 
that the Gospel is true for every creature, and it is 
part of that Gospel to tell men that they are all one 
great family — the family of the sons of God. 

Here indeed is a hard matter for either an 
Englishman or a Scot. Though he may have felt 
drawn to Christ, he is apt to pause when he begins 
to realize that this Jesus who does in some mysteri- 
ous way to touch the deepest chords of his being, has 
yet such strange and almost fantastic things to 
suggest to him. Yes ! a man might well be inwardly 
moved to do much for Christ, and yet feel that to 
recognize coloured men as even potential equals is 
altogether too much. Truly it is a hard thing to 
accept the principles of the Kingdom, and to enter 
it as a whole-hearted citizen. But Jesus never 
compromises. He identifies Himself with the least 
of His brethren. If we will not accept these least, 
we may not accept Him. Here is another thing 
which we may take or leave, but which we can 
by no possibility explain away. 



FEATURES OF THE KINGDOM 45 

It is a plain matter of honesty that at this point 
we should discriminate. 

We are apt to talk easily about the backward 
races, and to include under that title all but the 
white races. But it is certain that there are im- 
portant respects in which we Westerns have much 
to learn from Asiatics. It may well be that the 
contemplative Hindu, who sits so lightly to material 
things, is far nearer to the pattern of Christ than 
the bustling commercial man of the West. The 
distinctive Christian graces are *'love, joy, peace, 
longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meek- 
ness, temperance.*' And many who know the East 
tell us that it is there that those graces flourish most 
naturally. It is far from the truth to imagine that 
we Westerns will never have to sit at the feet of 
the Easterns in the attitude of scholars. 

On the other hand, of course, it is true that the 
members of some coloured races are still our back- 
ward brothers. And though we may look forward 
eagerly to the day when they will be our grown-up 
brothers, we cannot treat them as what they are 
not. To learn the right way of dealing with them 
is something which can only be achieved by a great 
deal of true feeling and inspired tact. It is very 
bad for a little brother to treat him as if he were 
grown up: to lend him a gun, for instance, which 
he cannot manage, or to offer him tobacco for 
which his body is not ready. And so it would 
be more than bad for some of our backward 
brethren to treat them in all things as we treat one 
another. It might be actually cruel. To impose 



46 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

upon African natives tasks of self-government 
which are utterly beyond them might be to plunge 
them into the miseries of anarchy. To encourage 
marriages between black and white while the two 
races are at such very different stages of moral and 
intellectual development might mean only preparing 
misery for those involved in such marriages. To 
realize our brotherhood with them fully may prove 
a long and difficult affair. It will be necessary that 
many members of the Kingdom should give them- 
selves to careful and detailed study of that part of 
the work. A hundred difficulties will present them- 
selves which only patience and a great deal of large- 
hearted wisdom can overcome. And it is work 
which can be done only by those who believe with 
Jesus that these backward brethren are our breth- 
ren. It can be done only by those who want in 
the end to achieve full and generous equality with 
them. We are on the whole a little further on 
than they are. Not so very far, for the brute and 
the savage sometimes rear their heads even in our 
decent British life. Yet still we are further on. 
We are like older brothers to them. We might do 
for them just what generous older brothers can do 
for the youngsters in a family. We might help, 
them to become men. But only if we share Christ's 
faith about them — ^only if we believe that in the 
deepest truth of things all men are brethren. 

Internationalism. — And now let us consider just 
one last consequence of an honest belief in this 
brotherhood. Jesus announced the coming of the 
Kingdom of God, but only of one Kingdom. He 



FEATURES OF THE KINGDOM 47 

did not suggest that there should be a British King- 
dom, and an American Kingdom, and a German 
Kingdom — but one Kingdom which should cover 
the whole earth. That is to say, He rose in His 
thinking above all national barriers. It was an 
amazing thing for a Jew to do, for among the Jews 
the consciousness of nationality was extraordinarily 
acute. Yet for Him the Kingdom meant something 
that was above and beyond national distinctions. 
One essential glory of that Kingdom lay in this, 
that its coming meant the achievement of the unity 
of mankind. It was for Him something into which 
all nations might enter, and in which all would find 
a harmonious life greater and richer than they had 
ever known in their isolation. Into it indeed each 
nation was to bring its glory and honour. To its 
ultimate wealth and beauty each would have some- 
thing to contribute. They were not to be called 
upon to surrender their peculiar gifts or to abandon 
their own special genius, but they were to find for 
them a fuller and a greater exercise when they 
came to live in relations of unity with all other 
peoples. It is here that we come into sight of the 
full splendour and magnificence of the Kingdom. 
It is to be something far more adequate to our lofti- 
est dreams than any partial empire, or any empire 
dominated by the genius of one people could pos- 
sibly be. At this point Jesus becomes the loftiest 
and the most imperially minded of all the world's 
thinkers. Nothing less could satisfy that great 
heart of His and that masterly mind than a unified 
life for all the peoples of the world, expressed in 



48 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

mutual service and a generous regard for each 
other's freedom. 

And this for a servant of the Kingdom, today 
has immediate and far-reaching consequences. It 
means that he must regard it as a thing intolerable 
that the nations of the world should remain in 
relations of antagonism, rivalry, and mutual suspi- 
cion. He cannot be merely a patriot, however 
truly he may love his own people. He must in spirit 
stretch out hands to all other nations and desire 
relations of brotherhood with them. He must be 
an agent for reconciliation. He must hate wars, 
as the very negation of all that he holds most dear. 
He must long to be delivered from his own national 
prejudices, and honestly want to be friends with 
God's other children of all kinds. Otherwise he 
is not of the Kingdom at all. 

Here, again, no doubt a host of practical and 
complicated difficulties confront Christ's people. 
There stand in the way of the realization of their 
ideas uncounted political tangles, and a cloud of 
poisonous passions — the aftermath of wars, tumults, 
oppressions, and the past follies of statesmen. The 
story of the crimes committed against our common 
brotherhood in the lifetime of this generation is past 
all telling. Europe today stinks and reeks with the 
odour of follies and brutalities which have de- 
graded our common humanity, and left the peoples 
sore, angry, and ashamed. The outlook for the 
apostles of internationalism is as dark as it ever 
was. And yet at least it has been shown beyond all 
contradiction that nothing but internationalism will 



FEATURES OF THE KINGDOM 49 

ever make the life of the human race a noble or 
even a tolerable thing. At last we know the worst 
about every other conception. At last we are begin- 
ning to see that if the whole enterprise of humanity 
on this little globe is not to end in shame and defeat 
we must learn how to achieve brotherhood. At last 
all current history is calling in loud and tragic tones 
for that which apostles of the Kingdom can alone 
bring to pass. The work those apostles are called 
on to do is difficult indeed; but it is that or utter 
and final shame. And in that sense this is indeed a 
great day for any man or woman who can be bold 
and desperate enough to abandon his or her life 
to utter obedience to the thought of Jesus. He 
must reign or nobody will reign. He must become 
Lord of all the earth, or base passions will destroy 
the house of civilization which we have built. It 
is, to paraphrase a well-known phrase, "The King- 
dom or Hell." Here indeed is a call to all who 
can be great in spirit. Here is all that men great 
in heart or head could possibly ask of adventure 
and great business. The only real question about 
the Kingdom is whether any of us can ever be 
great enough to belong to it. 

From these far-reaching thoughts, it may be 
well to turn for a moment to our actual daily life. 
The real problem of brotherhood for most of us 
is not the problem of treating either dark people or 
Germans in a Christian way, but the problem of 
being Christian to the ordinary and actual people 
whom we meet in our daily lives — the people in our 
own families, the other men or women in our year, 



50 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

the dons and tutors of our colleges, the queer and 
odd people who appear on the scene for us while 
life's wheel spins us about. It is they who are 
going to test us all and demonstrate whether we 
have an honest right to talk about brotherhood. 
Never having been in the East I find it quite easy 
to be positively thrilled by the idea of being 
''awfully decent" to black people. As no Germans 
of the blatant Prussian type come into my present 
world, it costs me nothing to agree that we ought 
to achieve relations of reconciliation with them. 
But there are people in my present world who 
present just as tough a problem as any swaggering 
junker could. They are the people who are really 
going to test me if I aspire to belong to the King- 
dom. Something of the same sort is true for every 
man. What of that cheeky little beggar you know, 
who is just as cocksure and aggressive as a quarter 
of an education ever made any man ! What of that 
terribly religious person whose whining voice seems 
to go down your spine and make you shudder! 
What of that young fool who is always telling filthy 
yarns so that you hear the fellows round him laugh- 
ing the silly half -ashamed laughter which blue 
stories always produce! What of that rich and 
well-born person who passes you by as if you had 
hardly any right to exist on the same globe as him- 
self ! What of those chaps in your college whom 
you feel to be bounders ! What of that unattractive 
girl you come across who is left alone by most 
people and must feel horribly lonely! What of 
conceited dons, tyrannous seniors, cheeky juniors, 



FEATURES OF THE KINGDOM 51 

bullying professors, and fussy mistresses! What 
of your gyp, your landlady, those business chaps 
you sometimes meet, or those shop girls you come 
across at times ! If you want to enter the Kingdom 
you must believe concerning them all that they are 
your brothers and sisters. Your creed will have to 
express itself in action or it will remain only an 
insincere sentiment — and it is insincere sentiments 
that have made the Church a laughing stock in so 
many quarters. 

It must surely be becoming plain that to believe 
in brotherhood is likely to turn out a matter so 
difficult that to achieve it will involve a great career. 
But it will turn out to be more than difficult. It 
will at times involve agony. It is very easy to talk 
about fellowship. It sounds as if it would be some- 
thing very jolly, like having a good time among 
friends. But fellowship or brotherhood has another 
side to it. There will be times when your brothers 
fall into sorrow, and unless you are going to desert 
them you will have to share their sorrow. They 
will have big worries in their lives and you will 
have to share those worries. Worse still they will 
do vile and weak things sometime which will disgust 
you, and you will have to choose between leaving 
them in the time of their greatest need, or staying 
in fellowship with them at the price of sharing their 
shame, and being dragged by them into a wrestle 
with evil which will strain your very heart. It was 
so with Jesus. The men and women with whom 
He lived in fellowship exacted from Him the last 
farthing which fellowship can ever involve. They 



52 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

so sinned that they would have broken His heart had 
it not been a heart strong with the strength of 
God. They flung shame and disappointment, and 
loneliness and agony upon Him, as if unconsciously 
they were determined to see how much He could 
stand, and whether suffering could break His love. 
They resisted Him and flouted Him and tried to 
trample upon Him, till at last He saw there was 
only one way in which to do the best for them, and 
that was to die at their hands. He could not over- 
come them in the interchange of ordinary life. He 
taught, and pled, and served, and loved, but all these 
things together did not succeed. There was ulti- 
mately but one way left open to Him, and that the 
way of the cross. In this supreme matter He 
found once more that the only way to live was to 
die. And His brotherhood stood the strain. He 
would not desert His brethren even when the price 
of holding to His love was that dreadful price. He 
would go to Gethsemane and Golgotha, if in that 
way He might at last win His brethren. And it 
was in that way He came to His victory. It has 
been the fact of Christ's agony unto death that has 
broken down human opposition and turned men 
from the sins which destroy life. He saved us by 
fellowship indeed, but it had to be fellowship unto 
death. He believed in brotherhood, but He had 
to prove it by dying at the hands of His brethren. 
And the same thing must always hold for us. 

Put the thing, if you like, in the most colloquial 
words possible — say that after all being a Christian 
simply consists in being decent to other chaps and 



FEATURES OF THE KINGDOM 53 

not in believing things or in going to churches. 
Well, if you really mean it you will find that "being 
decent to other chaps'* means sticking by them in 
their troubles, even when they have made utter fools 
of themselves. It will mean allowing their needs 
to interfere with your leisure and your pleasure. It 
may even mean having to give up some of your 
plans in life, and having your own affairs hopelessly 
compromised. You will find that being decent to 
other chaps is going to take a terrific toll from you. 
You will never find you have come to a point when 
you can say to your brother, '*What have I to do 
with you ?*' and that brother's needs may cling about 
you till you are hardly a free man. And then, 
though you despise theology and scoff at orthodoxy, 
you will have discovered for yourself that man's 
redemption can only be achieved by the cross, and 
that only a suffering God could save you or anybody 
else. 

Probably most of us are susceptible to the fas- 
cination of the idea of the Kingdom of God. Im- 
agination and heart catch fire at this conception of 
one world-wide Kingdom of peace, wherein men 
attain to their fullest possible life. But it would 
be well that before we go any further we should 
reckon also with the fact that that Kingdom can 
only be built by suffering, and that brotherhood is 
an impossible thing to those who will not carry 
a cross for the sake of their brethren. The King- 
dom was founded upon an agony and bloody sweat. 
The cross is its eternal symbol. He who would 
march with Jesus must march under that banner. 



CHAPTER IV 

METHODS IN THE KINGDOM 

It is not difficult to commend the Kingdom of God 
to the men and women of Britain so long as only 
some of its features are insisted on. 

There is a certain obvious fascination in the idea 
of complete and utter self-abnegation. It is a con- 
ception that links itself up with all that was finest 
in the old aristocratic ideal. The young knight of 
old was trained to believe that he must never hold 
his own life dear unto himself when any knightly 
cause was concerned. The finest of the old families 
of the country still hold that they were born to 
serve, and that self must not be allowed to interfere 
with their service. Our soldiers never become true 
soldiers until in spirit they have laid down their 
lives, and they know by experience the wonder of 
that joy which comes to the man who has got be- 
yond self-regard. Wherever good sportsmen are 
to be found there it is certain that the call to risk 
everything in a great cause will find a response that 
springs from the deep places in human nature. 

Further, the whole conception of a new and 
well-ordered world is certain to appeal to all who 
have been touched in heart by the miseries and in- 

54 



METHODS IN THE KINGDOM 55 

justices of our present world. Enormous numbers 
of men and women are heartily ashamed of our 
present life in many of its aspects. Our old ways 
are realized to be quite unworthy of a nation whose 
present liberty has been bought by the blood of 
heroes. It is this that lies behind the present pas- 
sion for reconstruction. And if Jesus can show us 
the way to a new and better world, that would 
decide the question of His claims for thousands. 

Again, all that is really pure and noble in radi- 
calism tends to enlist men on Christ's side. Radi- 
calism may seem at times to be merely an ugly form 
of class selfishness. But radicalism at its best is 
really the result of a passionate revolt of heart and 
conscience against a world that has been distorted 
by aggressive selfishness until much that is in it 
constitutes an affront to the Creator. And to 
radicals of that quality Jesus has always seemed to 
be a kindred spirit. In the halls of some of the 
most revolutionary and anti-clerical groups in 
Europe the portrait of Christ is none the less hung 
up as an object for reverence. 

In other words, wherever men of any kind have 
any unselfish idealism within them there the con- 
ception of the Kingdom of God has power over 
their minds and enlists their sympathies. 

But it would be well, before we go any further, 
to face the fact that there are features of the King- 
dom of God as Jesus preached it, which do not 
appeal to the average Englishman, and perhaps even 
less to the average Scot. 

I. To begin with, there is a large group of 



56 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

sayings in the gospels which might be summed up 
in the familiar words, ''Blessed are the meek, for 
they shall inherit the earth/' Now meekness is one 
of those virtues which most men admire in others, 
but which very few men desire for themselves. It 
is a convenient thing to find others meek; but most 
of us believe it might turn out a very unpleasant 
thing to be meek. Probably most men regard it in 
their hearts as a most excellent quality for women 
to have, and otherwise associate it with those ad- 
mirable and pious youths whose goodness is inti- 
mately related to their lack of high vitality. 

Now no doubt this is partly due to sheer mis- 
understanding of what Christian meekness really 
means. We think of it as rather a weak thing — 
as due in part at least to lack of proper spirit. But 
it cannot be that. It is a quality which Christ had. 
And no man who has ever looked at the real Jesus 
could possibly suspect Him of want of high vitality, 
strength, and courage. 

As a matter of fact, it is the opposite of self- 
assertiveness, and is therefore a strong man's 
quality. Christian meekness means that a man has 
attained to such a perfection of self-control that he 
will refuse to assert self even under great provoca- 
tion. To weak men pride, anger, and quick resent- 
ment come easily. He must be very strong who 
would be meek as Christ was meek. Yet even so, 
it is hard to want to be meek. It does involve 
humility. And humility is another quality which 
we approve, but do not as a rule desire. We have 
seen that we are to deny self, if we would enter the 



METHODS IN THE KINGDOM 57 

Kingdom, and for many men the denial of personal 
pride is the hardest part of it all. They can easily 
deny the flesh the pleasures it craves, but to deny 
the spirit is a far harder thing. 

We may want the Kingdom, but most of us 
would like to be allowed to fight for it. We would 
like to be allowed to express our reforming zeal by 
the forcible crushing of opposition, and by coercing 
those who will not agr^e. Crusading of the old 
mediaeval type appeals to us. The men who cried 
out for short sharp work with infidels and all pagan 
opponents would still rouse an echo in our hearts. 
But Christ will not meet us here. *'My Kingdom 
is not a worldly Kingdom, else would My servants 
fight.'' 'Tut up thy sword.'' Mere force cannot 
achieve Christ's ends. It is a thing irrelevant to 
His real purposes. Men have tried all down the 
centuries to carve out a Christian civilization with 
the power of the sword. They have patently failed. 
And the reason is that they have tried an impossible 
method. No doubt the vast majority of Christ's 
loyal followers hold that force must at times be 
met by force. Reluctantly but with clear con- 
science they justify defensive warfare. That, how- 
ever, leaves the main position quite clear. Force 
may restrain the evil-doer, but it cannot build the 
Kingdom. It is not a constructive power. It is 
not to the fighting instinct that Christ appeals. He 
needs men with many of a soldier's qualities: the 
power to take huge risks with a laugh, personal 
courage, loyalty to comrades, discipline, endurance, 
and so on. But for the will to dominate others by 



58 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

mere force He has no use. For the touchy, proud, 
or arrogant spirit there Is no place in His army. 

2. A second feature that is hard to accept is 
Chrisfs law of forgiveness. Prof. Seeley declares 
it to have been His greatest moral innovation. His 
followers are not to deal in retaliation. The old 
law had said, "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand 
for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound 
for wound, stripe for stripe/' That is still exactly 
the conception of justice which dominates the minds 
of the majority of men. But Christ calls His men 
and women to imitate that spirit which led Him 
when faced by His own cruel and lawless murderers 
to pray, "Father forgive them." 

It is certainly not natural. Our natural instinct 
rather agrees with Cicero, who accounted that man 
happy who on his deathbed could say that no man 
had done more good to his friends, or more harm 
to his enemies. Christ, on the other hand, would 
account that man happy who had most generously 
and freely forgiven his enemies. And He made 
His demand absolute. He would hear of no limita- 
tions. To one of His disciples, who had stretched 
his spirit to the point at which he thought it might 
be right to continue this policy until seven times, 
Christ replied by saying, "No, but unto seventy 
times seven." The world of that day gasped at 
such a doctrine. And it still does so. It is almost 
universally held that such forgiveness is sure to be 
interpreted as a sign of weakness. The refusal of it 
has been justified of late a thousand times on just 
that ground. But forgiveness — real forgiveness, 



METHODS IN THE KINGDOM 59 

and not merely a cowardly refusal to display resent- 
ment — involves great strength. Aristotle, in draw- 
ing the picture of that high-minded man whom he 
accepted as his moral ideal, declared that he would 
be too great to notice small offences, and would 
pass them by in sheer pride, while for great offences 
he would take a truly great revenge. But Christ, 
with a far deeper moral insight, declared that real 
greatness of mind would show itself in a forgive- 
ness which would never fail. He had climbed to 
heights undreamt of even by that great Greek 
moralist, when He prayed, ''Father forgive them.'* 
The secret of Christ's demand lies in the fact 
that forgiveness is the only ultimately successful 
way of overcoming evil. It is so, to begin with, in 
the case of individuals. Threats and punishments 
fail to eradicate the evil in man. At best they 
only force it underground. Bribes and promises 
fail to produce the virtuous heart. Their ultimate 
appeal is to the greed in man. Evil is a stronger 
thing than either the fear of pain or the hope of 
future reward. But it is not stronger than forgiv-^ 
ing love. Jesus used that weapon with the Magda- 
lene, with the thief on the cross, with Peter, and 
with Zacchaeus. And in all these cases it achieved 
the great result. It is the one weapon which God 
puts into the hands of men wherewith they can 
make headway against evil. Some evils which 
society has never managed to control, are just evils 
which society has never forgiven. Further, the 
same truth holds in connection with groups of men 
— with families, clans, classes, and nations. So long 



6o THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

as such groups act on the principle of retaliation one 
act of violence leads to another in an endless and 
tragic chain. Thus come vendettas, family feuds, 
class wars, and international wars. Politics and 
diplomacy, which disregard Christ, holding Him an 
unpractical dreamer, have proved powerless to 
break these dire traditions of evil. Some of them 
have for centuries overshadowed the life of whole 
nations. 

One thing alone can deliver the world, and usher 
in a new day for mankind. And that one thing is 
forgiveness. It ends evil because it wins the evil- 
doer. It gets at the root of evil, and undermines 
the spirit that produces strife. It saves the sinner 
because it makes its appeal to the good that is in 
him, and calls it into life. In individual cases it 
may seem to fail, but for all that it is for the race 
the supreme secret of escape from evil. Therefore 
Christ made it one of the fundamentals of His 
Kingdom. 

3. A third point suggests itself here. I can 
perhaps express it by saying that the Kingdom can- 
not be organized into existence. It does not come 
with an outward show. Organization is, of course, 
essential to all well-ordered life. It is an inevitable 
thing among intelligent and civilized people. But 
it is not a creative force. It directs life, and does 
not produce it. It cannot create the spirit of the 
Kingdom, and until the spirit is there no amount of 
organization can set up that Kingdom. 

Nowadays we tend to have a strange faith in 
organization. We seem to have an instinct for 



METHODS IN THE KINGDOM 6i 

propaganda, monster meetings, and magnificent 
manifestos. We create leagues and federations, 
with officials, constitutions, and funds (that always 
seem inadequate). We canvass for members, until 
many people could not say how many such societies 
they belong to. The roads of progress seem posi- 
tively congested by them. We have prevention so- 
cieties organized over against almost every known 
evil. And yet the strongholds of evil do not seem 
greatly disturbed. 

Jesus seems to have been quite uninterested in 
such things. He created almost no organization. 
He seemed suspicious of all outward show. He 
said His Kingdom would grow as seeds grow — that 
the spirit of it would work as leaven works — that it 
would spread like an infection. It begins to come 
into being so soon as men anywhere catch the spirit 
of it. It takes outward form so soon as the inward 
reality is there. But funds and fuss, and demonstra- 
tions and canvassings, do not bring it nearer. ''He 
did not strive nor cry." 

No doubt as it grows the Kingdom will trans- 
form politics and governments. It will inevitably 
and drastically reconstruct industry and commerce. 
It will end armies and navies. It will revolutionize 
education. It does mean a new heaven and a new 
earth. And no doubt, too, its servants will have 
to accept such callings as politics, and give them- 
selves to the business and the theory of govern- 
ment. The Kingdom is not something in the air. 
It is tremendously and blessedly real. God forbid 
that I should do anything but thank Him for the 



62 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

labours of all who are trying to lay hands on the 
tangled affairs of this world and bend them to the 
pattern of Christ. I conceive that such things as 
housing reform, educational reform, temperance 
reform, poor law reform, and so on, lie in the very 
forefront of the labours to which servants of the 
Kingdom are committed. Shaftesbury, Octavia 
Hill, Toynbee, and all their unnumbered following, 
have surely been among the greatest of the pioneers 
of the Kingdom. As society attains to new convic- 
tions about practical issues it will always insist on 
expressing them through the statute book as well 
as in other ways. 

But for all that, this question of method remains 
a central one for all who love the Kingdom. The 
Kingdom cannot be built unless the spirit of the 
Kingdom is living in human hearts. A hundred 
well meant Acts of Parliament which are dead 
letters constitute a warning to us that measures 
which are merely engineered into being by propa- 
gandist methods, and which do not express national 
convictions, are wholly vain. The mere political 
boss, the hustling propagandist, the big financier, 
and the commander of big battalions, are not among 
the people Christ needs. His work cannot be done 
in their ways. It is the meek, the poor in spirit, 
the sufferers, and the lovers whom He needs for 
His divine ends. They alone create the conditions 
out of which the Kingdom can arise. In a word, 
what does build the Kingdom of Heaven is love. 
The very essence of the faith of Jesus about human 
affairs was that "love never faileth/' It is stronger 



METHODS IN THE KINGDOM 63 

than money, more effective than armies, more 
triumphant than bribes and corruption, more en- 
during than even self-interest. The servants of the 
Kingdom are, indeed, called to overcome the world, 
but they are to do it by sympathy, by kindness, by 
persuasion, by sacrifice, by suffering — if need be by 
death. All the arts of love are needed. If they 
were to overcome by force or political cunning, it 
would prove at once that their victory was worth- 
less for the ends of the Kingdom. One great- 
hearted lover is of more use to Christ than a score 
of past masters in the art of political manipulation. 
Constantly it must seem that the way of progress 
for the Kingdom is blocked by old abuses which can 
only be shattered by political action, and often the 
necessary political changes delay their coming almost 
interminably and intolerably. But people who can 
love can always get on with the work of the King- 
dom. It is growing a little every day by the work 
of every soul that hopes unconquerably, believes 
unswervingly, and loves without counting the cost. 

Of course, it is hard to bend one's self to this 
method. Hot blood, eager and generous passion, 
righteous indignation, bitterness, and hatred that 
takes to itself the garb of righteousness, must all 
come under control before any of us can be of much 
use to Christ, or bring the day of the Kingdom any 
nearer. 

No one who knew ever said it was easy to follow 
Christ. 



All 



this may well lead us to a further point 



64 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

with which I may end this chapter. Persistently 
and earnestly Jesus used to warn His disciples that 
following Him would lead to trouble with other 
men. "Beware of men: for they will deliver you 
up to the councils, and will scourge you in their 
synagogues. ... Ye shall be hated of all men for 
my name's sake. ... If they have called the master 
of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they 
call them of his household.'* 

We are apt to think that these prophecies related 
only to the days of the early Church, and have no 
relevance for us. It is generally assumed that the 
days of persecution are over and that a follower of 
Christ may now expect to be allowed to live a quiet 
life without interference. But if we began to live 
simply and honestly on the principles of the King- 
dom we should probably very soon find out that the 
days of persecution are not over. Persecution does, 
of course, take very different forms from age to 
age. Bodily persecution would not now be toler- 
ated by the common conscience of mankind. So 
far, at least, mankind as a whole has moved. 
Further, history has shown that physical persecu- 
tion is a singularly unsuccessful method of com- 
bating Christianity. The blood of the martyrs has 
always proved the seed of the Church. Persecution 
is now much more cunningly adapted to its intended 
victims. Ordinary church members are not gen- 
erally reckoned today to be very heroic Christians, 
but if the choice betwen an explicit denial of Christ 
and immediate death were offered to them, I believe 
that the vast majority would promptly choose death. 



METHODS IN THE KINGDOM 65 

It is by much more subtle methods that most of us 
are led into disloyalty. The people who begin to 
break with the common conventions of society 
which involve uncounted compromises with the 
principles of the Kingdom are immediately looked 
on with surprise and dislike. At their best they 
are upsetting persons, and are therefore a nuisance. 
At the next stage they find themselves being called 
cranks, or fanatics. Other men and women are not 
comfortable with them and quietly exclude them 
from their society. They begin to find themselves 
lonely. Some are lonely in their own homes — some 
in their former social circles — some in business 
circles, where to be excluded from the common 
fellowship may mean serious money loss. Such 
people are at once held to be unsuitable for the 
higher posts in the professions, and though that 
should not trouble the wholly surrendered disciple, 
it does trouble most of us who are at best on the 
way to thorough discipleship. Some men after 
committing themselves to what seemed to them the 
Christian way, have seen the woman they loved 
looking at them with cold amazement and utter mis- 
understanding. And that is for many a harder 
thing to face than the stake. Some have found 
their friends slipping away from them one by one. 
Some have turned their employers into enemies just 
by the same method. In special cases it will happen 
every now and then that the Press will take up the 
cry and hound with scornful epithets the man who 
is trying to be loyal. Even the Christian institu- 
tions can hardly help adding to the trials of such a 



66 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

man. They have sanctioned certain conventional 
ways. In our time they have so far made terms 
with mammon, that thousands who are living for 
money yet find themselves not intolerably uncom- 
fortable within their borders. Many of them have 
accepted as insurmountable the ordinary class dis- 
tinctions. And the would-be-out-and-out member 
of the Kingdom wounds the susceptibilities of such 
institutions. He challenges their compromises. 
He is an innovator, and inevitably is held to be 
arrogant and impertinent. He disturbs that false 
peace which most of us have learnt to love. And 
thus those who in our day may dare to attempt a 
thorough discipleship are almost sure to find that 
their path is a lonely one, even within the Christian 
societies. 

These inevitable experiences have all the power 
of definite persecution to deter the timid follower. 
But if such men turn to Christ with complaints that 
His way is very hard, they will have a strange ex- 
perience. He will say to them in effect, "What did 
you expect? The disciple is not above his Master. 
If men hated Me, it is to be expected that they will 
hate you. No man can come after Me who will not 
take up some cross daily. Is your cross as heavy 
as Mine?" 

I am constantly being afresh amazed at the num- 
ber of people who expect that their religion should 
make them comfortable, and should merely soothe 
them. Men coming away from church where their 
consciences have been pricked, or where they have 
been compelled to suspect that their religion is not 



METHODS IN THE KINGDOM 67 

quite the genuine Christian article, complain that 
they went for comfort, and have been upset; that 
their spirits were longing for refreshment, and that 
instead they have had their views outraged. But 
Christ only promised rest to those who had taken 
His yoke upon them, and Christian rest is only such 
as is consistent with the wearing of a yoke. The 
disciple's soul may indeed dwell on the heights 
where the breezes of the divine joy blow for the 
renewing of life. But in the disciple's daily life 
there is sure to be a cross if he is following his 
Master. He has to be a man at war with the world. 
If he makes peace with the world he has denied 
Christ. 

About that we should do well to be clear before 
we begin to attempt to follow. *T have come," He 
said, "to set a man at variance against his father, 
and the daughter against her mother, and the 
daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a 
man's foes shall be they of his own household." It 
may very well be so — exactly so — with some today 
who resolve to follow the real Jesus. And it is sure 
to be the case that with pangs of heart a man finds 
himself constrained to part company with some 
whom he has dearly loved. To face enemies is 
almost an easy thing. But to see the backs of one's 
friends is a far harder thing. Let no man imagine 
he is safe even from that, if he means to follow 
Christ. 



CHAPTER V 

WAS THAT ALL?— THE KING 

So far I have spoken mainly of the demand which 
Jesus makes of men, and of the programme for life 
which He offers them. Give yourselves up en- 
tirely, He said, and then live for the Kingdom — for 
the reign of Brotherhood. And that, no doubt, is 
the way to life. Those who have tried it are eager 
to assure us of the complete success of that method. 
It does bring life to the individual, and it does bring 
salvation to society. Beyond question, too, there 
is something splendid in the whole programme thus 
proposed. It is very difficult, but only the more 
splendid on that account. It is impossible not to 
feel that heroism touched its highest point in Jesus, 
and that there is something essentially heroic even 
in the attempt to follow Him. 

There must, however, be a great many people to- 
day who will want to say, "But all that does not 
meet my case at all." Such people are not exactly 
worrying about their sins in the conventional sense. 
They are often quite eager to maintain that things 
which the Church has called sins are not sins at all, 
but rather advisable forms of experience. But for 
all that, they are out of harmony with life. They 
are perplexed, but with a perplexity which they 

68 



WAS THAT ALL?— THE KING 69 

themselves can hardly describe. Something is 
wrong somewhere, and it is something fundamental. 
They do not know exactly what they want, but it 
is certainly something they have not got. 

Many of them have no wish to deny the faith of 
their fathers, but they are discovering that they 
themselves have no special faith. In particular the 
war has for hundreds of thousands destroyed all 
possibility of falling back on any easy-going faith. 
The obvious facts of the world today are blatantly 
against all rosy views. Optimistic cries like, "God's 
in His heaven, all's right with the world," are an 
intolerable mockery to men who have seen the 
salient, or the ravaged areas, or who have sat 
through bombing raids among civilians. Such 
things have for many a man broken up his old half- 
conscious beliefs without giving him any new ones ; 
and meantime he is rather sick. He finds most 
things unsatisfactory — other people, and work, and, 
after a while, pleasure, and even love — they all pall. 
At times such men see clearly enough to know that 
the real fault is in themselves — that it is they who 
are diseased rather than life itself. They are out 
of touch all round — with their fathers, and their 
little brothers, and current politics, and the Church, 
and the Press. In a word, they have found no 
reconciliation with their present existence. 

And I am very sure that many a man of that 
kind would say, ''All this talk about the Kingdom 
rather wearies me. I am not in the mood to con- 
sider all these vast things which have got to be done ; 
something has got to be done to me before I am 



70 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

going to be of any use, or have any satisfaction at 
all. If all that Jesus had to offer was a vast pro- 
gramme, however magnificent, He does not meet 
my case/' Now what a man in that state is really 
in need of is some clear conviction about the world 
he lives in, and the God who rules it. He may not 
know it, but it is the lack of any such conviction, 
satisfactory to the mind and congenial to the heart, 
which is the root of his disease. A man must be 
able to feel himself at home in this life, if he is ever 
to know any settled inward peace. 

If this world is merely the disordered garden of 
an incompetent bungler, then no decent man can be 
satisfied to live in it. If it is the creation of a 
hostile and mischievous spirit, w^ho takes delight in 
man's petty flounderings, then the dignified thing 
would be to go out of the w^orld forthwith. If 
there is no mind and no heart behind appearances — 
if we are the sorry victims of mere drift, then 
indeed anger and humiliation would be justified, and 
hard to escape from. 

Few of us claim to be philosophers, or know 
what the word means. But for all that all of us 
really, once we have been up against it, want to know 
something about God. When Tommy at the front 
said to his chaplain, 'Tadpe, I wish you would tell 
us what God is like," he was voicing the real need 
of the hundreds of thousands who are in the state 
of mind I have tried to describe. 

Now this question of what God is like, is the one 
with which Jesus was most deeply concerned from 
first to last. It was the central purpose of His life 



WAS THAT ALL?— THE KING 71 

to answer it. All that He said about the Kingdom 
was really involved in His answer. He was not 
concerned in the first place to offer men a pro- 
gramme, but a faith. He knew that a programme 
without a faith is a folly. In this case the pro- 
gramme and the faith are inextricably involved with 
each other. 

Let us look, then, at the way in which Jesus 
answered the question about God. He did not deal 
in arguments to prove the existence of God, nor in 
discussions of any sort about Him. He did not 
proceed by interpreting His predecessors, or by 
reasonings from first principles. He was a prophet, 
not a lawyer or a scholar. 

No ! what He had done was, firstly, to come to 
know the Father for Himself. Into that wonder- 
ful process of learning and growing intimacy, which 
must have occupied the first thirty years of His life, 
we have not been allowed to see ; but we do see the 
result. The result was that He was able to show 
men the Father. He possessed something which 
He could pass on. He had a clear and radiant 
vision which He could share with other people, and 
He lived to pass on to others what He knew. 

He did it in various ways. Partly He did it by 
scattered and spontaneous utterances about God 
such as, "He clothes the grass of the field," "He 
sendeth His rain on the just and on the unjust," 
"He is kind unto the unthankful and the evil." 
Those who heard Him speak after that fashion must 
have come to realize that Jesus felt the presence and 
the handiwork of God in all the beauty and the 



72 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

bounty of nature, and all the ordinary processes of 
the natural world. Some at least must by associa- 
tion with Him have come to possess that seeing eye 
which catches some glimpse of God every day even 
in this troubled world. There were men who even 
at the front got such glimpses daily — through the 
songs of the birds whom even the guns could not 
silence — through the poppies that would grow even 
among blood-stained trenches — through the sough 
of cooling winds — through the calm splendour of 
the stars — and through hundreds of homely deeds 
of kindness which were inspired by the godlike 
goodness of ordinary men. Jesus evidently con- 
stantly had such glimpses, and those who lived with 
Him must have learnt to have them too, till they 
also came to know the Father. 

But more particularly He did His work of re- 
vealing the Father through definite pictures of Him. 
With the inspired touch of the world's supreme 
Master in the use of words. He painted God for us. 
He did not use abstract Vv^ords, He preferred to 
tell the simplest of stories. Two in particular must 
always stand out. They are both in the fifteenth 
chapter of Luke. God, He said, is like a shepherd, 
who though he has ninety-nine of his hundred sheep 
safe in the fold, must needs go out in the mirk of 
the night to seek in the desert for the odd and silly 
one that had got lost. And God is like a father 
with two unsatisfactory sons — one a silly wastrel, 
and the other a self-righteous prig — who none the 
less spends himself in affectionate and endearing 
services to win them both home, and to share his 



WAS THAT ALL?— THE KING 73 

best with them. Human thought has only soared 
on that one occasion to that height in expressing 
God, and there for all time the most sublime con- 
ception of Him remains enshrined: A conception 
surely so sublime as to be the proof of its own truth. 

And yet great as these methods proved for 
Christ's purpose, His supreme method was just to 
be Himself. He, alone of all men, dared to say, 
"H you have seen Me you know what God is like.'' 
*'If you despise Me," He said, "you despise God." 
"If you receive Me, you receive God." "No man 
can know God unless he knows what I can show 
him" (cp. John xiv. 9, Luke x. 16, ix. 14, x. 22). 

He was, in fact, a God-filled person, and to 
be with Him was to be learning the truth about God. 
We get to know God, therefore, by marking all the 
outstanding things in the life and manner of Jesus. 
Disease had to give way before Him. Moral 
poverty exposed itself in His presence to be met by 
words of hope and good cheer. Little children 
knew by instinct that here was one with whom they 
could let go their shyness and be at home. The 
failures of the world gathered round Him to breathe 
in a new faith for themselves in the future. Crowds 
of rough people purposing some corporate evil had 
again and again to give way before Him. And as 
we note these things we are progressing in the 
understanding of God. All the wonderful things 
which were indicated in the first chapter of this 
book are facts about God Himself. 

The whole three years of the recorded life of 
Jesus were one long telling of the truth about God 



74 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

for which elsewhere we search so largely in vain. 
In Jesus it is made so plain that even a child cannot 
miss it. 

Now for the moment let us assume that in all 
this claim He made Jesus was justified, and that all 
He showed of God is the very truth. What does it 
all amount to in relation to the common perplexities 
of man? 

It means, firstly, that this world is a world with 
love behind it — a world into which a God of love is 
constantly trying to break. He offers Himself to 
individuals as a power that can redeem their lives. 
To broken, tired, and disillusioned men He offers 
first of all that the past may be blotted out — that 
the stains on their natures may be cleansed away. 
He offers to break the chains which bind us to the 
evil precedents which we have set up for ourselves. 
In a word. He offers forgiveness. And then He 
offers power for the future. That good life after 
which in his heart every man longs becomes a 
possibility, if what Jesus shows of God is true. 
Though we are weak in will and inconstant in 
purpose, a true life is made possible to us because 
God Himself will dwell within us and live out 
through us a life after the pattern of Christ's. 

It means, secondly, that this world is in the care 
of One who purposes the Kingdom. Those who 
labour at it and for it are not disquieting themselves 
in vain to bend the world into a shape it will not 
take. They are working in line with the Creator. 
"Fear not," said Jesus, "it is your Father's good 
pleasure to give you the Kingdom." Thousands of 



WAS THAT ALL?— THE KING 75 

people feel that the Kingdom is a beautiful concep- 
tion, but are chilled habitually by a sense that it is 
too good ever to come true. Nature and human 
nature are, they believe, against it. Certain evils 
like war and prostitution always have been and 
always will be. Servants of the Kingdom are, 
therefore, no doubt well-meaning idealists, but are 
up against something permanent in the nature of 
things which is bound to prove too strong for them. 
But Jesus never paid any such compliment to evil. 
The Father of love was on the side of the Kingdom 
and therefore its coming was in time inevitable. 
God was not going to be beaten in His own world. 
He had a confidence about that which the whole 
confederation of the world's evil powers could not 
shake, and He invites us to share that confidence. 

It means, thirdly, that God means intensely well 
by every individual on the earth. A hard thing to 
believe indeed ! Of what value to God can all the 
individuals be among the teeming millions of 
Europe, Asia, Africa — primitive, rude, and futile 
creatures ? How can even God attach any value to 
the units in that uncounted stream of petty creatures 
who have poured across the face of the world all 
down the ages, buzzing like flies about their petty 
affairs and then going out into the night? How 
can even God do more than watch the whole thing 
with a sort of wholesale benevolence? How dare 
any one out of the mass suppose that he is noticed 
from above ? Our imagination staggers here. We 
teach children to say, *'God loves me.'' But for a 
grown man it is one of the hardest things to say 



;6 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

with conviction. How can God love individuals? 
But Jesus, at least, was quite clear about it. *'Not 
a sparrow can fall to the ground without your 
Father, and ye are of more value than many spar- 
rows. The very hairs of your heads are all num- 
bered.'* And if we can make a great effort and 
believe it on the word of Jesus, then indeed life 
becomes a new thing. We live it before the face 
of One whose interest in us and love for us are 
beyond all measure. The universe may seem 2l cold 
and indifferent affair, but, as a matter of fact, in 
and through it all a Father is drawing near to us, 
and watching us with personal and undying affec- 
tion. Truly, if that is really so a man has nothing 
to whine about. 

But fourthly, if God is really like Christ, then 
He is a most human God, interested in the most 
homely affairs. Jesus liked to watch children at 
their games, and I doubt not knew the rules of them. 
He was keenly concerned about the ordinary jobs 
of ordinary men and spoke about them out of inti- 
mate knowledge. He was immensely interested in 
marriage, and spoke of its mystic joys with a beauti- 
ful emphasis. He loved society and social occasions, 
and could always rejoice with those who were 
happy. And if God is like that, then He is a God a 
man could love. Most of us in our secret hearts 
grew up disliking God. What had been told us 
about Him did little but beget first fear and then 
repugnance, which we believed to be very wicked, 
but which was there none the less. But if God is 
really like Jesus, then it would indeed be a great and 



WAS THAT ALL?— THE KING ^7 

splendid thing to be able to have anything to do with 
Him. 

And lastly, if God is like Christ, then God is one 
who in face of all evils bids us hope. He does not 
hurry things on, it is true. He will not compel men. 
He lets them sin and live as fools if they will. 
Evidently He does not want mechanical puppets 
who go the right way because they are wound up 
to do it. He wants free men, who have come at 
last to true life by free choice, even though it be 
also after many a mistake and bungle. But through 
it all He loves and hopes and believes in man : loves 
unto death, believes as only love can, hopes with 
unconquerable divine persistence. 

Now if that is all true, then the secret men are 
in search of is revealed. H that is all true, then 
life at once becomes a satisfying and glorious affair. 
What is really wrong with the perplexed and wor- 
ried spirits is just that they are lonely. They are 
lonely with a loneliness which only God could 
satisfy. And if Jesus was right, then God is wait- 
ing to satisfy it at once. 

Ah, but is it true ? It is clear that Jesus believed 
all that about God, and embodied it in His own 
life. It is clear He staked His all on it, and died 
to manifest it. It is clear, too, that the conviction 
of its truth persists, and has redeemed this life for 
thousands. They have found strength and joy and 
a certain unshakeable peace through believing. 
Plainly even if it is a delusion it is a most beneficent 
one. 

But is it true? I have admitted that Jesus did 



78 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

not prove it in any of the ordinary ways which the 
logical instinct of man expects. Perhaps it only 
needs a little reflection for any one to see that a 
fundamental matter like this could not be proved 
by mere logic, or any of the ordinary scientific 
inductive methods. But, if so, how can a man be 
sure about it? How escape from the suggestion 
that it is only a beautiful dream — the most sublime 
and exciting of all possible dreams, but still and 
only a dream? 

Now at this point I conceive a man must needs 
become autobiographical who wants to deal honour- 
ably with his fellow-men. If anybody has found a 
way of becoming certain over this point, he must 
needs tell others about it or commit the supreme 
selfishness. And yet all that I have to say is so 
essentially commonplace that I may well use the 
plural in saying it. Thousands of people are will- 
ing and able to say it too. And what we have to 
say is really this. We do believe this with a cer- 
tainty that has become a vital part of us, but we did 
not come to believe it by w^ay of abstract reasoning. 
We may hold that a very strong case for this view 
of God can be made out by pure thinking. We 
may see, as, for instance, the scientist Romanes 
came to see so clearly, that reason is at least not 
against this view. But it was not by a process of 
reasoning that belief came to us. In a word, Jesus 
has made us believe it. 

We have been in His company a good deal, and 
when w^e are there we find we cannot doubt it. By 
this time it has come to possess us. It has estab- 



WAS THAT ALL?— THE KING 79 

lished itself in our most intimate experience and is 
now part of us. His utter conviction about it has 
proved irresistible. It was a passion with Him, and 
that passion is infectious. It has claimed and held 
us. With many of us, conviction has come bit by 
bit, but year after year its hold on us has increased. 
It seems to us that every part of us has become 
involved in assimilating this faith. Our hearts have 
leapt up in response to it, and our love has insisted 
on grasping this truth and holding it fast. Our 
sense of beauty has been wholly satisfied by it, so 
that we are moved by this conception to the same 
sort of emotion as the greatest works of art, or 
nature at her best, produce. Our wills have been 
constrained by it, and every act we perform at its 
bidding makes our conviction the clearer. And if 
the logical faculty in us has not played much part 
in this matter, at least our minds have been gripped 
and filled by the splendour and sublimity of this 
whole view of the universe. And so, as we have 
lived with Jesus, it has come to pass that with every 
power in our beings we absorb His faith, till at 
times it seems that our whole natures are living in 
vital response to His mind. 

Even though it were shown to us that no abso- 
lutely "doubt proof" demonstration of this truth 
can be offered to men, yet none the less we are 
willing to stake our all on its being true. If this be 
the venture of faith we are willing to make it and it 
does not seem to us much of a venture, when we 
have Jesus on our side. It seems to us the easiest 
and the most obvious thing to trust that man. 



8o THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

One rather simple way in which this can be 
stated is to point out that either this whole view of 
God and human life is true, or else Jesus was a 
deluded and dangerous fanatic. But that view of 
Jesus is simply untenable to those who look at Him 
honestly. Men call Him an impossible idealist, but 
only because they have not looked fairly at Him. 
In some ways He was a very stern realist. He 
would not shut His eyes to any of the things which 
have moved others to despair and cynicism. He 
went through experiences which made Him weep. 
He drank to the dregs the cup of knowledge — 
tragic and heartbreaking knowledge. Whatever 
faith He had it was sustained in full view of all the 
open facts in one of the darkest hours of the 
world's life. No ! it is impossible to write Him 
down as a deluded fanatic. And it is equally im- 
possible to write Him down as a deceiver. He said 
these things so often and so movingly, that if they 
are not true He was indeed a lifelong deceiver. If 
He was not the express image of the Father He 
was the last embodiment of blasphemy. And that 
is an impossible view of Him. By every hour of 
His life, and by every feature of His personality, 
He gives the lie to that suggestion. Of the only 
two alternatives offered us here one is impossible, 
and we needs must fall back on the other — ^namely, 
the conclusion that Jesus was right. 

And yet, while I have thought this point worth 
putting, I do not think it has been by facing such 
alternatives that as a matter of fact most of us 
have come to believe. What I said before is the 



WAS THAT ALL?— THE KING 8i 

real truth about that : Jesus has made us believe as 
He believed. We have come into some sort of 
moral or spiritual contact with Him, and it has come 
to pass that we cannot but think as He thought. 
He is a self-evidencing person. All that is deepest 
and best in us unites to constrain us to say as we 
know Him, "Here is of all men the one most cer- 
tainly to be trusted.'* It is not simply an emotion 
with us. Our verdict about Him is a symphony 
in which all the faculties of our being play a part. 
To deny Him our implicit trust would now mean 
violating our whole natures. 

And so to any man who is perplexed and out of 
harmony with life — to any man who feels he needs 
to find life's secret, and to come somehow to recon- 
ciliation with life, and people, and the world in 
general, I have simply this to say — Concern your- 
self with this man Jesus. Absorb the truth about 
Him. Make Him the companion of your mind and 
heart. And it cannot but be that in time you will 
discover that He has given you a faith — a faith 
which redeems the whole of life, and turns it from a 
puzzled fumbling with distracting mysteries into a 
glorious, romantic, and magnificent enterprise. 



CHAPTER VI 

WHAT DOES HE WANT YOU TO DO? 

A GREAT many men who feel the attraction of Jesus 
of Nazareth are none the less intensely repelled by 
the suggestions which are made to them by those 
who try to enlist them for the Christian side of life. 
I. The Question of Reserve. — Anglo-Saxons are 
naturally reserved people. God seems to have made 
them that way. No doubt they often overdo their 
reserve to their own great loss, but it is also an 
element of great strength. Many of them do not 
readily or easily show their feelings, and yet by 
that very fact keep their feelings sincere and strong. 
And such men often feel that the call to be a 
Christian is a call to break through their own re- 
serve. They feel they are being summoned to dis- 
play their feelings and to expose the hidden things 
of the spirit. Insistent evangelists create the im- 
pression that they are trying to break down the 
natural spiritual chastity of their hearers and to 
invade the soul's secrets. 

And this is why so many men literally hate re- 
vivalistic meetings. They shun sentimental excite- 
ments because of a deep-seated instinct. If by 
chance they are carried away by feeling in some 
public gathering, they are sore and ashamed after- 

82 



WHATDOESHE WANT YOUTODO? 83 

wards, and take great care to run no further risks 
of that sort. 

No doubt emotion has a central place in life. It 
is the force that runs the world. Mere intellectual 
convictions have little power until they become 
passionate, and the man who cannot feel deeply will 
never accomplish great things. But emotion does 
not need to be displayed in corporate ecstasies. It 
is meant to produce action, and a man has a large 
right to keep his emotions to himself until he can 
express them in action. In meetings where men 
and women revel in their own emotions, there is 
great danger that emotion should become an end in 
itself, and when that happens sincerity of character 
is at once threatened. 

I do not want to criticize those people whose 
natural temperament makes it congenial to them to 
indulge in corporate displays of emotion, or to sug- 
gest for a moment that the spirit of God is not truly 
at work in many mass religious movements, but 
I do think it quite plain that Jesus made no demand 
upon men for the display of emotion. As I search 
the gospel pages I find that a strange absence of 
excitement characterized the whole movement there 
described. Once or twice the crowd seems to have 
broken out into exuberant joy, but on the whole 
it was a very quiet movement — very quiet, and 
simple, and honest, and deep. Jesus never forced 
Himself upon anybody. He never invaded the per- 
sonality of any man. He never asked intrusive 
questions, or indulged in aggressive persuasions. 
Men came to Him and told Him of their own wills 



84 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

all the deepest secrets of their lives, and He was 
always ready to share such secrets and help men 
out and on. But His characteristic method was to 
declare His message, and thereafter simply to 
welcome all who came to Him to offer their loyalty. 
Plainly there was in His heart a passionate longing 
after all men. But He would not try to force any- 
body — not even with emotional forces. 

I have heard it again and again complained con- 
cerning some Christian Unions in universities that 
their members have alienated the sympathies of 
good men and women, and that they have done it 
by a certain well-meant aggressiveness, and by ap- 
pearing to ask of students an emotional display of 
their religion. 

I do not think that such Christian Unions can 
claim to be following any precedent in the life of 
Christ. 

2. The Matter of Belief. — A second thing that 
has repelled many from all organized Christianity is 
that they have been made to feel that they are being 
called upon to say they believe what in their hearts 
they know they do not believe. The duty of faith 
has often been so presented as to make it seem the 
duty of achieving a kind of wholesale ''swallow/' 
by which all the difficulties of belief are got over 
once for all. Many a man when presented with 
Christian doctrine has felt "but believing this would 
for me be like believing that two and two make 
five." And to such men it has often been said, 
"Well, you must just take it on trust, and believe 
it all the same!'* On these terms many a man is 



WHAT DOES HE WANT YOU TO DO? 85 

left feeling that he must choose between mental 
honesty and faith. 

But the word faith is really misused when it is 
handled in this way. When certain truths come 
home to men in experience so that they become 
inwardly convinced of them, they may be said to 
hold them by faith. They hold them, and that with 
clear certainty, even though they cannot give a full 
intellectual account of them, or defend them by 
mere reasoning. They do not believe without proof, 
but it is personal and experimental proof. "That 
which we have seen and heard declare we unto 
you." That is the attitude of people whose belief is 
a matter of faith. But the word "faith" is misap- 
plied when used in reference to historical state- 
ments, or reasoned theological propositions. The 
criterion of history is criticism, and the criterion of 
reasoned statements is reason. To ask men to 
accept either the one or the other by an act of blind 
submission in which reason is kept in suspense is to 
offer them an outrage, and to tempt them to dis- 
honesty. 

And here again I find in the methods of Jesus no 
trace whatever of this attitude. He did ask from 
men a great act of moral submission, but He never 
tried to force the mind of any one. The disciples 
found Christianity a very hard thing to do, but they 
did not find it hard to understand. Christ never 
tried to crush the mind. He was not in the first 
instance concerned with the matter of intellectual 
belief at all, and when His religion is presented to 
men simply as a series of propositions about God 



86 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

and man, life and eternity, it is misrepresented. 
What Jesus offered to men was primarily a wonder- 
ful and largely new conception of God. But He 
did not argue about this conception, nor embody 
it in any doctrinal form. It was to Him an im- 
mediate apprehension of the soul, and He tried 
to lead men on till it became that with them, too. 
It was a view of God which is not contradicted by 
reason, but which is beyond reason in the sense 
that reason alone could not attain to it. In life and 
word Jesus embodied it. He expressed it iii im- 
mortal pictures. He lived it. And so men gained 
it from Him. He still wants men to gain it from 
Him in the same way. 

No doubt after He had done His work there 
was a great deal left to think out. Perhaps there 
always will be. Because men have acute intellects, 
they must always want to think out the whole con- 
ception of the universe which the Christian view of 
God implies. And that may take many centuries 
yet. Because of certain irrepressible instincts 
within us, we shall probably till the end of time 
want to sit down before the ultimate mysteries and 
try with all our mental power to penetrate them. 
But such activities are not essential to Christian 
living, and a man is not called upon to hold to any 
particular solution of the problems of the intellect 
before he begins to follow Christ. There always 
have been large numbers of Christians of the 
Thomas type, for whom the one question that 
mattered was, "What does He practically want me 
to dof" The place of theology in human life will 



WHAT DOES HE WANT YOU TO DO? 87 

always be an honoured place. But its place is not 
in the porch of the house into which men go seeking 
fellowship with Jesus. 

3. The Fear of Being Unusual— K third thing 
that keeps men and women from any final decision 
about Christ is the fear that if they submitted them- 
selves to Him He might call upon them to do some- 
thing unusual, extraordinary, and even unconven- 
tional. And how most of us do shudder at the 
very thought of having to do something "which is 
not done." Now this suspicion, I believe, is entirely 
justified. I feel sure that Jesus will call on any 
man who comes to Him to do very extraordinary 
and unusual things. He sent seventy of His first 
followers on a campaign of field preaching which 
must have made many of them shiver with nervous- 
ness beforehand. He has sent stay-at-home souls 
to the ends of the earth, and timid souls to do such 
things as street preaching, and so on. If you have 
not in you a spirit that is willing to take risks and 
dare strange things, you cannot deal with Qirist. 
He does not want you to remain simply a conven- 
tional Briton, for notoriously the conventional 
Briton is not yet Christian. 

But it is equally certain that Jesus will send no 
man to a job beyond his strength, and that He will 
ask no man to act without conviction. Men who 
were at the stage of hesitation have often said to me, 
"But I can't do anything. I couldn't teach kids to 
save my life. I could never possibly speak or pray 
in public. I hate meetings of all sorts. I feel sure 
I could never play up." Well, the answer to such 



88 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

men is, I am sure, that they will never be asked to 
do things which they cannot do, though it is certain 
that they will be asked to do things which they don't 
want to do. They are certain to come to points in 
the Christian way when they shrink and shiver and 
would give anything to be allowed to go back. 
Christ had at one point to go to the cross, and His 
whole being seems to have risen up in a shrinking 
revolt. Yet He went. On a lower plane such 
hours come to all His followers. They, too, want 
to revolt, but if they are really followers they, too, 
go. Only, as I said, Jesus does not leave us without 
the necessary convictions to support us. When you 
become quite sure that to do some unusual thing is 
for you the right thing — when you see it clearly as 
a part of your Christian discipleship, then you can 
do it. It is when you are still in doubt that you 
feel a fool in doing strange things. Many a man 
ere this has allowed others to cajole him into trying 
to do some unusual or extreme thing, which in his 
heart he was exceedingly doubtful about. And such 
men have indeed felt fools both at the time and 
afterwards. But no man ever feels a fool when he 
tries to act on a conviction. The real trouble is that 
he is apt to find that he is more of a coward than 
he wishes to believe. 

Further, it is quite certain that Jesus never gives 
the wrong job to the wrong man. If you really 
cannot '*teach kids," then you will not be called 
upon to do it, though it is the finest work the world 
offers. If you are no organizer, you will not be 
asked to organize. If you are no speaker, you will 



WHAT DOES HE WANT YOU TO DO? 89 

not have to speak, though it is still unfortunately 
possible that you will not be prevented. What 
Jesus really wants of every man is the exercise of 
the gifts which God has given him, not the exercise 
of gifts which have been withheld. He would have 
you fulfil yourself — not misuse or distort yourself. 
The body of Christians in your immediate world 
may not be as wise as Christ in this matter, and may 
try to put force upon you. But Jesus puts that kind 
of force on no man. When you follow Him you 
may have a dangerous and uncomfortable time, but 
you will at least have the joy of acting on convic- 
tion and of trying to use some gift which you ^ 
possess. 

4. What He Does Want — Can we then say 
what Jesus does want us to do ? I believe we can, 
and although I have touched on this point in 
Chapter H., I gladly return to it to examine it more 
fully. 

We can put it to begin with by saying that Jesus ^ 
wants every man to discover what is for him the 
call of God, and then to follow. There is a call of 
God for every man. He made us for His glory, 
and there is no man or woman among us who can- 
not live to that glory. The one essential is that we 
discover our call. It is not always an easy thing to 
do, but some general things may be said about it. 
It is certainly not a call to do nothing — to live on 
your means and amuse yourself, however in- 
nocently. It is certainly not a call to the way of 
least resistance, because most dogmatically Jesus 
insisted that there is always a cross in it. It is not 



90 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

a call just to swim with the tide. The people of 
Jesus have always found the world against them. 

The way in which Jesus Himself put it was to 
say that it is a call to "Seek first the Kingdom of 
Heaven." That means this, that the man or woman 
who decides to close with Christ must resolve to use 
the whole of life, and all the talents which he or she 
may possess, for the purpose of setting up the 
Kingdom of Heaven. In other words, what is at 
stake in this matter is the whole business of a man's 
aim in life. The conventional life purpose is "to 
get on in life" — to make money — to improve one's 
position — and then to settle down in comfort. That 
cannot be reconciled with Christian discipleship, 
though notoriously it is often reconciled with 
church membership. Christ's terms are that we 
seek first the Kingdom — that all personal aims be 
subordinated to that. We are to live to extend the 
reign of God in every department of life — domestic, 
social, industrial, commercial, political, and interna- 
tional. And having that aim such things as a man's 
own prosperity, or fame, or wealth, or ease, must 
be held quite secondary. 

That is the great issue which a man must face 
who would decide for Christ. And beyond all 
doubt it is likely to cost most of us many a wrestle 
in the night, and many a day of agony. I have read 
that when the call of God came to Shaftesbury — the 
call to give himself to the cause of the maltreated 
victims of industry — he saw at once that it would 
cut at the roots those political ambitions in which 
he had been brought up, and that he lay upon his 



WHAT DOES HE WANT YOU TO DO ? 91 

bed writhing in grim agony while he tore from his 
heart his darling desires. He was no exception. 
To turn one's back upon oneself means a terrific 
struggle for most of us. And that is the struggle to 
which Christ summons us — not to sentimentalism, 
or the swallowing of doubtful dogmas. We are to 
crucify personal ambition. And it will always be 
for many so hard a thing that going through the 
throes of it will mean actual fellowship with the 
sufferings of Him who endured the cross. 

When, however, we have got that point clear I 
believe our thought is apt to take a fatally wrong 
turn. Many men who become sure that Christ is 
calling them to a religious vocation also believe that 
He is calling them out of life's ordinary vocations. 
They think that they must take up one of those 
ways of life which are conventionally called re- 
ligious — that they must become ministers, or mis- 
sionaries, or agents of religious societies, and so 
forth. Perhaps we are misled by the fact that the 
first disciples had to leave their fishing, and become 
for the rest of their lives itinerant evangelists. But 
we should not be misled by that fact if we stopped 
to remember that while Jesus needed those special 
men for special purposes, He was also calling all ^ 
men unto Him. 

Now it may be that there are some ordinary 
callings which will have to be utterly forsaken by 
Christian disciples. If a calling cannot be exer- 
cised ad majorem dei gloriam, it will have to go. I 
have a pretty clear persuasion to that effect in the 
case of bartenders and bookmakers, and at least 



92 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

grave suspicions about a few other common callings. 
But I am sure that the callings which stand con- 
demned by Christ are all of them callings which are 
socially harmful, and which therefore stand con- 
demned by the interests of society. 

But once we have recognized that point, then it 
is possible to say that Jesus does not want men to 
change their occupations, but to employ those very 
occupations as methods of forwarding the King- 
dom. All the normal occupations of civilized men 
are capable of being made into religious vocations. 
It is not necessarily more Christian to be a parson 
than to be a first class lawyer, or a commercial man 
of the finest kind, or a good bootmaker, or a first 
rate shop hand. 

Christian vocation is something so wide and 
comprehensive that it covers the whole of human 
life. We tend naturally to exalt some callings 
above others. I suppose, for instance, that all 
men at least would agree in putting first among 
great human vocations that of the real mother. 
But this grading of occupations is really a mistake. 
All the occupations which are necessary to the com- 
plex life of man are capable of being exercised in 
such a way as to bring the Kingdom further into 
being, and for that reason they are all really equally 
honourable, and religious. 

Therefore I conceive that the man who would 
follow Christ is called upon to choose his occupa- 
tion as wisely as he can in view of his circumstances 
and abilities, and then to learn to regard his occupa- 
tion as his way of forwarding that Kingdom. The 



WHAT DOES HE WANT YOU TO DO ? 93 

Kingdom has not yet been built, partly because a 
great many good people have thought of it as some- 
thing to be worked at in their spare time — on Sun- 
days and in the evenings. It can never so be built. 
It will come into being only as men learn to submit 
their daily callings to the control of its principles. *^' 
For my part, and as I see the present situation, it 
seems plain beyond question that the supreme need 
of Christ today is not the need of ministers to pro- 
claim the principles of the Kingdom, but the need of 
grim and resolute practical men who will enter the 
arena of ordinary life with those principles as their 
orders, and will grapple with the terrific problem of 
conforming our actual life to the pattern shown us 
in the mount. When we have big business men, 
and big employers, and big labour leaders, and big 
financiers, and big lawyers, whose one aim in life * 
is to set up the Kingdom of God, and that without 
considering what is going to happen to them in the 
by going, then the Kingdom of God will be getting 
really near. But though I mention a few occupa- 
tions in this way as examples, the same thing is true 
of them all. If a man's occupation is necessary to 
the wholesome life of mankind — if he is not min- 
istering to diseased cravings and unwholesome 
wants — if he is not a parasite or a trafficker in 
senseless luxuries, but one who supplies something 
which true human life requires, then his calling is 
at once capable of being transformed into an instru- 
ment for building the Kingdom, and Christ does not^ 
ask him to forsake it, but rather to make it some- 
thing greater than it has been. 



94 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

Let me amplify this point by considering the 
case of Industry a little further. We use the word 
to cover all those forms of mental, manual, and 
mechanical dexterity through which the material 
needs of the world are supplied. It must therefore 
always be the case that, along with agriculture, 
industr}' must always fill the lives of nearly three- 
quarters of mankind. 

Now theoretically considered it is surely plain 
that there is something truly splendid about in- 
dustry. It represents a million triumphs of the 
mind and brain in utilizing nature and bending 
matter to the service of man. It provides oppor- 
tunity for the exercise of the creative faculty in 
man, which is among his very highest faculties. It 
might provide endless opportunities for team work, 
or that cooperation in big undertakings which brings 
a divinely sweet joy into life. When it results in 
securing that any body of people are well housed, 
clothed, fed, and warmed — when it provides them 
with convenient transit, and eases for them the 
burden of life — when it produces stately cities, and 
noble buildings — when in fact it brings it to pass 
that the friction and labour of ordinary life are 
reduced to a minimum, then surely it achieves a 
very noble result. There will certainly be no King- 
dom of Heaven on earth until industry is redeemed, 
and constitutes in itself an illustration of the work- 
ing of the principles of the Kingdom. Yet what 
is it today? A notoriously unhappy and unstable 
thing. To millions the conditions that maintain 
within the industrial world seem to shut out God. 



WHAT DOES HE WANT YOU TO DO? 95 

They are not conscious that they are fulfilling 
themselves in any noble or useful way within its 
borders, but are in a state of constant revolt against 
its principles. Because there is a constant state of 
warfare within that world the whole of human life 
is soured for millions. Employers often feel this 
acutely, and wage earners feel it still more so. Men 
have often smiled at me as if I were some strange 
kind of fool, when I have suggested that a man 
should exercise his Christianity within his working 
hours. *'Why," they have said, '*life in a workshop 
is one long and bitter fight, and how can that 
possibly be made a religious occupation ?" A great 
many business men are quite blunt about the matter. 
"Christianity," they say, "simply cannot be applied 
to business. Business is a matter of struggling for 
your own hand, and the man who would survive in 
the business world must be smart and alert, and 
vigilant for number one." 

What lies below all these sayings is, of course, 
the fact that industry and commerce are wrongly 
based morally. "The foundations of society are 
wrong, because the relations between man and man^ 
are wrong. Jesus told us to love one another, but 
as a plain matter of fact we do not love one an- 
other."^ That is what makes industry and com- 
merce such bitter things, and destroys the spiritual 
life of so many who are involved in their struggles. 

And so plainly there is going to be no Kingdom 
of God in the world until industry and commerce 
are radically transformed — until the motive of 

^ The Call to Battle, Student Christian Movement. 



96 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

^ service takes the place of desire for private gain as 
the mainspring of them both — until all harsh rival- 
ries are removed from their workings. That trans- 
formation presents itself to my mind as the greatest 
task which was ever proposed by the will of God to 
the wills of His children. It is going to call for all 
that is greatest in man — for the exercise of his 
intelligence, his ingenuity, his organizing ability, his 

V moral powers of self-restraint and unselfishness, his 
imagination, and his heart. But unless and until it 
is done this can never be a Christian country. So 
long as three-quarters of our people are for eight 
hours a day subjected to the influence of a great 
system which is not Christian, so long will it be 
absurd to expect to see them growing in Christian 
character. For the evangelization of Britain in the 
true sense of the word the transformation of in- 

y dustry is essential. 

And now let us come back to this question of 
what Jesus wants a man to do. For the great 
majority of men life is going to be lived within the 

^, industrial and commercial world. Is it not plain 
that Jesus must want a great army of men and 
women within that world who will set themselves to 
help in the gigantic task of this vital and tre- 
mendous transformation? A comparatively small 
proportion of us may be wanted in such callings as 
the ministry. But the great mass of us are wanted 
for this central and more difficult calling. 

I believe this is the form in which the challenge 
of Christ is coming to the young of this generation. 
Some solution of the problem of industrial unrest 



WHAT DOES HE WANT YOU TO DO? 97 

must be found or we are undone. And there can ^ 
be no abiding solution but Christ's solution. Will 
the young, and able, and virile of this present hour 
dare to accept Christ's leadership and in His name 
go to this battle? It will be necessary, of course, 
not only to have manual workers and captains of 
industry working at the matter. Lawyers will be 
needed to help in working out the new organization 
and in giving it legal form. Teachers will be needed 
who will help to train the kind of men and women 
who can work a Christian system,. Writers, artists, 
and journalists will be needed to embody the ideals 
of the Kingdom in such shapes of beauty as will 
capture the imagination and satisfy the soul. The 
Kingdom will never come fully till we all help, and 
meantime it is certain that there is a place in its 
working ranks for any man or woman v/ith any 
power of any sort. 

Some who read these words may mean to be 
doctors, and for them what all this means is just — 
By all means be doctors, but be sure you are doctors 
who live not for fees but for health, not for your 
advancement but for the common good. Some may 
mean to go into business, and to them what this 
message comes to is — Certainly go into business, but 
go with the purpose of transforming business into 
something which will be conducted on the prin- 
ciples of the Kingdom, and reckon now with the 
fact that if you go with that purpose you will prob- 
ably never be rich, and may indeed be very poor. 
'Though He was rich yet for our sakes He became 
poor." Some may mean to take up teaching either ^ 



98 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

in school or university, and the word to them seems 
to be — What better could you do, but see to it that 
you do not become a mere place hunter, who merely 
does his work because it is necessar}- to do it in 
order to draw a salary, but a man or woman who 
lives to teach truth, and in that and other ways to 
serve the younger lives you touch. Some may mean 
to take to agriculture or forestry or mining or scien- 
tific research, or the civil ser^-ices, etc., etc. ; and to 
all such the same things may be said. One and all, 
these callings are capable of being made notable 
forms of serv^ice for the Kingdom of God. When 
they are so regarded they become worthy of all that 
is greatest in man. When they are otherwise 
looked at they are mere divergent ways of petty 
self-seeking. 

No doubt it will take a good deal of thinking on 
the part of individuals to find out just exactly how 
their particular duties and opportunities may be 
used for the sake of the Kingdom. There is much 
real discover}- to be achieved still in this direction. 
And Christ's disciples will have to get together, that 
they may think and work together over such con- 
crete questions. I believe that when the Church 
rises to the actual calls of our day it will offer to the 
men of any particular trade or profession oppor- 
tunities for thinking out together how that particu- 
lar trade or profession miay be so transformed as to 
make its pursuit a method of realizing the Kingdom. 
And I fancy that such discussions of intensely prac- 
tical issues are likely to prove both more interesting 
and more profitable than the discussions of theo- 



WHAT DOES HE WANT YOU TO DO ? 99 

retical questions which once so heated the nominal 
followers of Jesus. Possibly, too, the ministers of 
the future are going to find that people have very 
little use for mere listening, and when the sermon 
has been at least partially dethroned to make way 
for cooperative study of the will of Jesus, the 
coming of the Kingdom may be greatly hastened. 

One last thing must be said before this chapter 
closes. It is simply this — that all those who in the 
sense here indicated are going to accept the call of 
Christ, are so surely as the sun rises going to find ^ 
themselves *'up against it." The man who tries to 
do business on Christian lines will not only lose 
money by it at first, but he is sure to be called a 
fool. He will find his trade or his business associ- 
ates getting angry with him. If he is in an em- 
ployers' association he may have a very bad time 
of it. If he is a Trade Unionist he may have some 
very heavy risks to face. If he is an employee he 
will very often make his employer angry. He will 
probably find himself passed over when promotions 
are going. Indeed, he will often get the sack, and 
find himself facing a hostile world not knowing 
what is to come next. The world will not want 
such men, and it will probably try to starve them 
out. To set out on the path of discipleship may 
seem at first a great and inspiring adventure, but ^^ 
afterwards tribulation and persecution are sure to 
arise, and it will then be seen whether by such things 
the would-be disciple is going to be offended. 

Yes, Christian discipleship is as hard as all that ! 
It would be well to reckon with the fact to begin 



100 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

with. Among the things He wants you to do this 
is certainly one. He wants you to be willing to face 
the scorn and opposition of men for His sake and 
the Kingdom's. And the scorn and opposition may 
at times be very bitter and drastic. 

Is it worth it? Does He deserve such things 
^ from His followers ? If you are not quite sure that 
the answer to these questions is Yes then you are 
not yet ready to set out with Him. 



CHAPTER VII 

WHAT ABOUT HUMAN NATURE ? 

Of those who reach this point in this volume, a 
number must, I am sure, have wanted ere this to 
break in with the exclamation, "This is all very 
beautiful and fine, but it is also hopelessly idealistic. 
These suggestions as to a way of life are far too 
high and hard for ordinary people. In fact, the 
whole programme is simply not practicable in view 
of what human nature is/* I notice that many 
people are made impatient to the point of anger by 
having such suggestions put before them, and that 
they are apt to demand a religion that does 
not ask so much, and is therefore more suited to 
what they call average humanity. Such people are 
often heard insisting that "human nature is human 
nature" — that "selfishness will out*' — that the mean 
and cowardly elements in mankind are ineradicable 
and must therefore be reckoned with, and that the 
well-meaning enthusiasts who call us all to sublime 
ways of life are really wasting their time. Men 
have said to me repeatedly, "Oh, at times I feel in- 
clined to attempt that way of life, but at other times 
I find I can't rise to it, and want something easier. 
I am sure, therefore, that I could not keep it up, 

lOI 



102 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

and it seems to me that the honest thing to do is to 
make no pretence of being Christian/' 

Beyond all question the world's attitude to Jesus 
is that He was a well-meaning idealist, but that He 
is also hopelessly impracticable as a leader for 
ordinary life. The idea of taking Him seriously 
either in international or home politics, in business 
or in industry, has not yet been honestly entertained 
by any nation. This is still the real attitude even 
of thousands who attend church. If it were re- 
ported that a Chamber of Commerce or a House of 
Commons had paused in its proceedings that the 
members might quietly consider, "What is the mind 
of Christ about this business v/hich we have in 
hand?'' the news would electrify the world. It is 
not only Germans who think that ''real politik'' is 
something too serious and hard to be brought into 
honest relation to the thought of Jesus. 

Now whether it be right or wrong it is certain 
that this common attitude is the most powerful of 
all the obstacles to progress in the Christian sense. 
y Men declare things to be impossible, and so long 
as that conviction holds the field they are impossible. 
So long as men are in that state of mind they cannot 
honestly try to realize Christ's purposes. We must 
believe that things are possible before they can be- 
come possible. All who have ever worked for the 
cause of Purity must have found that the supreme 
difficulty they have to face is just callous scepticism 
about any real change. It is that scepticism which 
leads men to declare concerning such evils as prosti- 
tution, "Oh, these things have always been and they 



WHAT ABOUT HUMAN NATURE ? 103 

always will be," or in other words, '*Human lust 
will always prove too strong for moral reformers/' 
The same thing appears in connection with war. 
By far the most dangerous force in society today in 
that connection is the widespread opinion that man 
is incurably a fighting animal, and that therefore no 
league of nations or other covenants of peace can 
ever be really effective. Thus, though men long for 
peace and know something of the degradation of 
war, they succumb beforehand to the menace of a 
brute instinct. 

Exactly the same thing appears in connection 
v/ith the controversy over competitive commerce 
and industry. A great many people assume it as 
axiomatic that the only effective spur to effort for 
the great majority of mankind is the hope of private^ 
gain, and that to trust to any other motive whatever 
would result in letting the wheels of efficient eifort 
run down. 

To this extent a low view of man holds the 
field, and disinclines men and women from taking 
Jesus seriously. 

And it must be admitted in view of this whole 
contention that there is something in it. The "some- 
thing'* that is in it produced those sepia stained 
pages in which Calvinists have written of the total 
depravity of man, and his entire inability in his 
natural state to do any good thing. 

To understand Calvin it is only necessary to 
watch the crowd of men and women in any large 
city at their weekly Saturday revels, or to find out 
the real facts in connection with any great social 



104 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

evil, such as cheating in business, or drink, or im- 
purity. We would all like to hold wholeheartedly 
the most optimistic views about mankind, but the 
facts which have emerged in the last year or two 
alone, about profiteering, about sexual laxity, and 
about intemperance, are enough in themselves to 
chill all easy optimism. Rather are we all con- 
strained to say, 'There is no hope of any Kingdom 
of Heaven on earth — indeed, there is no hope of a 
just state of society unless these men can be 
changed.'* Or in other and older words, "There is 
no hope for the world unless there can be found 
a 'remedy for sin/ '' It is good to get things down 
to simple words. The real issue here is whether 
or no we believe that sin can be overcome. If it 
can, then ideals are not impracticable things. If it 
cannot, then it is waste of time even to talk about 
them. 

^ What of Jesus then ? It is certain to begin with, 
as I have repeatedly said, that His idealism was not 
based upon any ignorance of the real evils of life, 
or the deep-seated evil in man. He knew^ all that 
Calvin knew — all that modern sceptics in connec- 
tion with morals know. But He also saw other 
things in man, because of which He believed that 
men and women will respond to the love of God 
once it is fairly revealed to them. He saw in man 
something w^hich made it seem worth while to die 
^for man. He believed, as thousands have come 
of late to believe, in the wonderful latent goodness 
of the ordinar)^ waj^vard man or woman. He be- 
lieved that there is in each human being a greater 



WHAT ABOUT HUMAN NATURE? 105 

self than meets the eye, and that that greater self 
can be called into life. He believed in fact, if we 
like so to put it, that man can be saved, and that ^ 
He knew the secret of his salvation. 

That secret lay in the fact, which was so clear 
to Jesus, that God is always at hand to enable the 
man who will turn to Him to do things which are / 
impossible to mere human nature. On one occasion 
His disciples discussed with Him the possibility of 
a rich man's being saved, and when they had 
listened with amazement to Jesus as He declared it 
was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a 
needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom, 
they asked with a certain wonder which we can 
well understand, '*Who then can be saved?" And 
to that Jesus made answer, "With men this is im- / 
possible, but with God all things are possible." It 
was His conviction that if men would but once 
get into living relation with God they would become 
able to do such things as He did Himself — and even 
greater things. He did not propose the Kingdom to 
"mere" men, but to men in whom the Father is 
willing to live. In fact. His promise, "Ye shall 
receive power" is as fundamental a part of His 
message as the other words, "Seek ye first the King- 
dom of Heaven." 

What this means is that our study of the King- 
dom message of Jesus is incomplete and really 
worthless unless we understand also what is called 
His promise of grace. If we go back to the histor- 
ical Jesus for a programme, and stop there, we 
shall do nothing. If that programme is ever to 



io6 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

become a reality we have to learn to live by the 
present power of God, who is known to us in Christ. 
What is really meant by grace is just the influence 
'^of the living God. And Jesus knew for Himself 
that that influence is always available, and that 
• through it a man may do and dare the impossible. 
From moment to moment He lived by it. The great 
secret He wanted to share with His disciples, and 
still wants to share with us, is that any man may 
live by it from moment to moment. 

What we are really faced with here is the ques- 
tion of the secret of achievement in human affairs. 
We are apt to suppose that when men achieve not- 
able results of any sort the explanation lies in the 
unusual powers which they possess. We look back 
upon history and say of its outstanding figures that 
they were men of genius — men with abnormally 
great brain power, or will power, or with a special 
endowment of energy. And plainly so long as we 
rest in that explanation of their lives, we also feel 
that their lives have very little significance for us. 
For most of us know with painful certainty that 
w^e have no abnormal gifts. 

But the great men both of the Hebrew tradition 
and of the Christian tradition give a quite different 
explanation of their achievements. Unanimously 
and whole-heartedly they repudiate the suggestion 
that there was any special power or genius in them. 
What they do say is that the constraint of God came 
upon them and carried them through. All that they 
had done was not to resist. They were weak things 
whom God had used — that was the whole story. 



WHAT ABOUT HUMAN NATURE? 107 

The point is so vital that it is worth while to 
recall some especial instances. Take the case of 
Gideon to begin wdth. When he first appears in 
history it is as a shy discontented man living in an 
out of the way corner, and wondering why some one 
did not do something to deliver his enslaved nation. 
And then the call of God came to him. He could 
not at first believe it was the call of God. He ac- 
counted himself one of the least and weakest of the 
nation. He argued and tried to escape. But God 
said to him, ''Go ! have not I sent thee !'' and the 
result was that he saved Israel. Or turn to Jere- 
miah's story. He was of all the Hebrew heroes the 
most sensitive, shy, and retiring. His ideal for 
himself would have been a little country cottage, 
where with wife and child he might have lived out 
his days undistracted by public affairs. But the 
constraint of God came upon him. It was, he says, 
like a smouldering fire shut up in his bones, and, 
though he, too, held back for long, the day came 
when he was weary with forbearing and could not 
stay. He had to go, and going he played one of 
the most heroic and effective parts ever played by 
any man of his nation. 

The same story is told by the Psalmists, one 
after another. "I will not trust in my bow, neither 
shall my sword save me, but Thou hast saved us." 
"The mighty man is not delivered by much 
strength/' *'My soul wait thou only upon God, 
from him cometh thy salvation.'' That refrain 
recurs in Psalm after Psalm. The prophet Zech- 
ariah re-echoes the same message: ''Not by might 



io8 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

nor by power, but my spirit." So does John the 
Baptist: "A man can take unto himself nothing 
except it be given him from Heaven." As for St. 
Paul, it may truly be said to be his characteristic 
message — the eternal thing in his witness — that God 
, can take the weak things of the world to confound 
the mighty. Of himself he dared to say, "I can 
do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me." 
For all the urgent needs of a difficult and dangerous 
life he had found that "His grace is sufficient." 

And to these testimonies, yet another and a 
more impressive one must be added. The account 
which Jesus gave of his own achievements is in the 
familiar words, 'T am not come of myself." "I can 
of my own self do nothing." "I have not spoken of 
myself." "The Father that dwelleth in me, he 
doeth the works." He was not in this essential 
respect different from his brethren. He, too, lived 
by a power that came to Him from His Father. 

Here, then, is the great secret. The great things 
of the world's history have not been done merely by 
the power of human brains and genius — not by reso- 
*^luteness of will, and enormous exertions of self- 
directed energy. They have come to pass through 
men and women who yielded themselves up to God 
to be used by Him, and very often they themselves 
were vastly astonished at the things which God 
brought to pass through them. 

It is not necessary, in receiving this truth, to 
depreciate the value of human brains and energy. 
They are always gifts of God, and are essential to 
good work. But the truth seems to be that no 



WHAT ABOUT HUMAN NATURE? 109 

amount of brains and energy will enable a man to^ 
do work of lasting value luiless he is constrained 
by God, and that, on the other hand, every man has 
at least enough brains and energy to do some work 
of lasting value if only he will submit to be guided 
by God. 

It would not have seemed to Jesus a reasonable 
thing if His disciples had turned to Him, and urged 
Him to remember that they were only weak and 
ignorant men, so that it was absurd to look to them 
for the building of the Kingdom. He would merely 
have told them that God was w^aiting to work ^ 
through them, and that, therefore, all things were 
possible to them. And it would not seem to Jesus a 
reasonable thing were we to turn to Him and decline 
the enterprise of the Kingdom on the ground that 
we are weak and wayward men. God knows that 
is pitifully true. But Jesus would say to us also 
that the power of God may rest upon us, that the 
spirit of God may dwell within us, and that all 
things may be possible to us too. 

Again, let me say Jesus did not propose the 
Kingdom enterprise to mere men. He proposed it v 
to men in whom God was willing to dwell — to men 
who might draw from God all needed power even 
for the gigantic task of that Kingdom. And this is 
the explanation of the amazing optimism of Jesus. 
Though men showed their worst to Him, He con- 
tinued to believe that they would yet respond to 
His summons, and build the Kingdom. He never 
paid any evil thing the compliment of believing that 
it was permanently rooted in the order of things. 



no THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

jHe never despaired of humanity. And the reason 
was that He knew the human heart to be a possible 
temple for the living God. 

All this has a peculiar significance for a very 
numerous class of men and women in our day. I 
mean the class of those who quite honestly protest 
that they are not interested in the matter of personal 
salvation at all. Sometimes they describe them- 
selves by saying that they don't care about their 
souls one way or the other. It seems to them a 
kind of selfishness after all to be bothering about 
their spiritual condition, and they resent the calls 
that are still sometimes sounded in their ears 
bidding them seek security while yet there is time. 
What such people are interested in is the business 

"^ of making this world a better and a happier place 
for the mass of men. They do really love others, 
and in the service of others they are able to forget 
themselves altogether. Many of them protest that 
they have no interest in theology, or in most of the 
talk they hear about religion. What we have got 
to do, they declare, is to get on with the plain busi- 
ness of loving other people, and there is nothing 
difficult to understand about that. For that reason 
they often feel much of the talk that goes on in 
churches to be simply irrelevant to the real business 
of life. 

I have nothing whatever to criticize in the atti- 
tudes here suggested. The man who can and does 
fill his life with the practical business of loving 
is, indeed, a kindred soul to Jesus, and if he forgets 
himself altogether in that preoccupation, he will 



WHAT ABOUT HUMAN NATURE? in 

none the less be living spiritually on the heights. 
I know of nothing in the gospels which would 
justify one in asking the man who is successfully 
obeying the two great commands of Jesus to stop 
and bother about his soul. 

But the trouble with most of us is that we find 
we cannot successfully obey the two great com- 
mands of Jesus. When we set ourselves to serve 
the world and love all men, we are brought up sharp . 
by the discovery of our own pitiful incompetence. ^ 
One day temper breaks forth and spoils a whole 
day's living. Another day indolence lays its para- # 
lysing hand upon us, so that some task for the King- 
dom goes undone which the night should have seen 
finished. On a third, some unruly desire escapes 
from control, and prevents us from living in the V 
Kingdom temper. Or it may be that the weight of 
our own cares becomes so heavy that we cannot 
produce unselfish love. Or worldly ambition gets 
under our guard, and we find ourselves in the ranks 
of Christ's enemies. 

In fact, having set out to reform the world we 
come to a day when from our heart there bursts the 
cry, "Who are we to try to reform the world ? We 
need to be reformed ourselves, and until we are we 
are going to be of no use." It is a critical and 
horrible hour in a man's life story. While he is in 
it the beautiful ideals which once inspired him be- 
come only mocking memories. In his disillusion- 
ment about himself, he is apt to become disillusioned 
about all other people and about things in general. 
The danger at that point of turning down the mean 



112 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

by-path which leads to cynicism is very, very great. 
Because he has tried to redeem the world and has 
failed miserably, he is apt to assume that the whole 
suggestion of world redemption is only a foolish 
dream. Thousands at that point in life have de- 
cided to compromise with the world as it is, and 
have therefore been of no more account for the 
enterprise of the Kingdom. The ranks of the 
middle aged are swelled by thousands of men and 
women who once were idealists, but who have now 
"settled down." They have not got very satisfied 
faces. They are not making a specially great thing 
of life. But they are prepared to argue that it is 
only foolish to expect more of life than they are 
finding in it, and that to dream dreams of a new 
heaven and a new earth as they once did is only a 
youthful folly, which it is best to outgrow as soon 
as possible. It is thus that Christ has lost armies of 
men and women who once appeared to be promising 
recruits. 

I But there is another way out of that bad hour in 
life when a man first discovers his own incompe- 
tence. It is the way taken by those who in their 
need discover the grace of God. Such men find 
that just because they want to help others they mast 
think of themselves. They need not think selfishly, 
but they must take honest account of their own 
weakness and inconstancy. Because they would 
i fain help to save the world they must first be 
saved themselves. Salvation truly conceived does 
not mean being rendered complacently certain that 
an eternity of bliss awaits us, but being made fit 



WHAT ABOUT HUMAN NATURE? 113 

for real service in the Kingdom of God now. In- 
deed, no man is saved until he has forgotten to 
think about bliss for himself and has learnt to think 
first of the Kingdom. And if a man who in that 
sense wants to be saved, turns to Jesus, then Jesus 
meets him with the old, old promise of grace which 
is yet new every morning. Put in very simple 
language, what that promise amounts to is, I con- 
ceive, just this — That if we will admit our need and 
turn to God for strength we are sure to get it. If 
we give up trusting ourselves and learn instead to 
trust God, He does not fail us. If we lean on 
Him, the journey becomes possible. If we feed our 
beings upon His spiritual resources they prove suffi- 
cient to meet the case. 

It is exactly for this reason that many men and 
women find they only live successfully when they 
daily partake of the eucharist. And of all who ever 
lived successfully in the Christian sense it is true 
that they had learnt daily to feed their souls upon 
Him who is offered to us in the eucharist, although 
they may not have outwardly partaken of that 
sacrament. 

As I see things, we have here reached the heart 
of the whole matter — the central truth for all who/ 
would fain follow Jesus, or who are interested in 
the Kingdom. When we have learnt to see our 
careers in the light of the Kingdom — when we have 
discovered our vocation in relation to it — we still 
shall not be able to follow them without the daily 
help of grace. The artist will need it if he is to deal 
truly with beauty. The business man will need it, 



114 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

if he is to be inspired for the lofty and difficult call- 
ing of Christian business. All who deal with men 
will need it, if they are to treat men continuously 
as their brothers. The thinker will need it, if he 
is to think truly. For the grace of God is as wide 
as human life. It fits the case of every man who 
is doing any bit in the great workshop of Christian 
civilization. It is available for husbands and wives, 
for fathers and mothers, for sons and daughters, 
for public servants, for doctors and teachers, for 
lawyers and accountants, for all who create with 
hand or head. Without it none of these callings 
can be made divine. With it they all become ways 
of extending the Kingdom. ^ 

And now it is possible to sum up all that has 
been said in these pages. The world was made for ^ 
the Kingdom, for it was made by the Father of 
Jesus who preached the Kingdom. The human 
race is waiting for that Kingdom, for in it alone 
lies the remedy for all the evils which today so 
tragically afflict it. And the Kingdom can be built 
by ordinary men and women, because to them God / 
will without measure give His extraordinary grace. 
Because of that, there is no evil thing in the world 
with power in it to stand against them. There is no 
kingdom with power to stand against Christ's 
Kingdom. 

To every man and woman there is offered the 
chance of helping, and only by helping can life be ^ 
made really great. There is no width or wealth of 
life comparable to that enjoyed by those who are in 



WHAT ABOUT HUMAN NATURE? 115 

the harness of the Kingdom, and in fellowship with 
God. No man may truthfully plead inability. By 
the grace of God every man can do something that 
vrill really help. The only question that remains 
undecided for each of us is : ''Will we take the grace 
of God and accept the service: or are we going after . 
all to continue to huddle in the mean and sordid 
house of self ?'' 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE RESOURCES OF THE DISCIPLE 

After the disciples of Jesus had lived with Him for 
some time they became aware that every now and 
then He was not to be found. He would disappear 
^ for a whole night at a time, or would go off into 
the mountains alone. He would seem to have in- 
sisted at all costs on securing such solitude and such 
quiet. 

When they asked Him what He was doing at 
such times, He told them He was praying. Quite 
possibly they themselves had never prayed, and had 
not thought of it as an essential thing in life. 
Almost certainly they did not know how to pray, 
and had hitherto been content in spite of the fact. 
But it cannot have escaped their notice that Jesus 
came back from His lonely periods of prayer re- 
stored both in body and spirit. After very busy 
and crowded days which had worn out His whole 
being. He would go away into the quiet and then 
return to His work with all His great powers of 
spirit in full and fresh activity. Therefore there 
came a day when these men who wanted to follow 
Jesus and work for His Kingdom came to Him and 
said, *'Lord, teach us to pray." They did not know 
at first how much it would m(an to them, but they 

Ii6 



THE RESOURCES OP THE DISCIPLE 117 

had at least grasped the fact that one of the secrets ^ 
of a life of successful service lay in prayer. And 
that remains a fact. 

Perhaps we are hindered at this point by the 
very word "prayer." To us it possibly suggests the 
use of certain prayers which we may have learnt, 
or taking part in some definite form of church 
service. We shall not understand until we get be- 
hind such things. What prayer really means in its 
essence is recovering a living sense of God's reality 
and presence. It means some such quiet waiting 
in spirit as will lead us once again to know that He 
is with us. When the fretted, weakened, and per- 
plexed man or woman becomes aware that God in 
unchangeable strength and wisdom and love is at 
hand, then prayer is achieved. By contact with 
Him of that sort the spirit of man is restored and 
quickened. In such hours quietness and courage, 
hope and energy come back to human beings, and 
the disciple is made fit for more of the warfare of 
Christ. The strongest and the weakest here stand 
together. All alike need to be thus restored again 
and again if for them the labours of the Kingdom 
are to be possibilities. We have seen already that 
the enterprise of the Kingdom is not proposed to ^ 
ordinary men, but to men filled with the extraordi- 
nary grace of God. And what is meant by prayer 
is really just such an attitude of spirit as shall allow 
the grace of God to reach the recesses of the nature 
of man. 

No doubt the difficulties of this subject are very 
real and apparent. They are of two sorts — theo- 



n8 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

retical and practical. It is diflficult to understand 
how prayer achieves its results, or why it should be 
necessary, and it is difficult to learn how to pray. 

I do not propose to enter on a discussion of the 
theoretical difficulties of prayer. If we are only to 
ask what is the will of God it must occur to the 
simplest minds to wonder why we need to ask God 
to do what is His will. If He has promised to 
answer prayer it is difficult to understand why so 
many eager prayers seem to receive no answer. It 
is very difficult to think out any intelligible account 
of how intercession for others achieves great results. 
Personally I believe that all these difficulties can be 
fully met. An answer to them is found by experi- 
ence, and Christian thought has achieved a great 
deal in the efifort to think out the matter. But for a 
discussion of that whole matter I can only refer my 
readers to such books as that comprehensive study 
of the subject, edited by Canon Streeter and called 
"Concerning Prayer," or to such studies in the 
teaching of Jesus as Prof. Hogg's "Christ's Message 
of the Kingdom," or Prof. Fosdick's "The Mean- 
ing of Prayer." 

What does stand out quite clearly amidst all the 
mysteries which surround this subject is that by a 
certain attitude of spirit, which we call the attitude 
of prayer, men and women do come into some con- 
scious relation to God, and that the constant experi- 
ence of that relationship is the very secret of all 
high vitality in a disciple. Only those who practise 
deliberate silence and quiet are able to hear the still 
small voice by which God directs His children. 



THE RESOURCES OF THE DISCIPLE 119 

Only those who fall back habitually on His un- 
limited strength and unchanging goodness escape 
unbearable nervous strains. Few at least are able 
habitually to hope in this distracted world unless 
they become habitually aware of Him — the quiet, 
patient, and all-powerful one. About that the testi- 
mony of all the Christian centuries is perfectly clear. 
Whether we can understand or not in this connec- 
tion we can know. I do not happen to understand 
how food nourishes the body, being wholly ignorant 
of physiology. Nor do I understand how such 
waiting on God restores the soul. But I am quite 
as sure of the latter as a fact of experience as I 
am of the former. Here experience justifies a 
really dogmatic statement. Except we learn to 
pray we may not hope to achieve much for Christ. , 

And that brings me to the second difficulty of 
this matter-^the diffilculty not of believing in prayer 
but of learning to achieve it. Thousands of people 
who have no intellectual difficulties in this connec- 
tion are almost hopelessly baffled by the practical 
ones. Perhaps as children they ''said their prayers," 
but when as adults they try to attain to something 
more real and vital than that they fail. They de- 
clare that they cannot achieve any living experience 
of God through prayer. They have tried so often 
without success that they have given up the effort, 
and are now almost annoyed, and certainly baffled, 
by all insistence on the necessity of prayer. 

And yet I believe the fact remains that we must 
learn to pray if we are to be able to serve. Only I 
am quite sure that we do not need to learn to pray in 



^ 



120 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

any one way, and perhaps it is just here that many 
have made a fatal mistake. I use the word "prayer" 
to cover all the ways in which the human spirit 
»^ becomes aware of the Divine spirit, and those ways 
are uncounted. 

When Wordsworth during his communion with 
nature became avv^are of "a presence which dis- 
turbed him with the joy of elevated thoughts/' he 
had attained to prayer at its very highest. Probably 
a great many are like him, and will only know the 
best of communion with God when nature, which is 
His garment, has helped them to realize Him. 
Plainly many of the Psalmists used nature in this 
way to rise to a sense of God. The gospels even 
suggest that Jesus used nature in the same way. 
And yet to others it has nothing to say. To them 
the open country is simply dull. 

I remember a man who told me in a moment of 
confidence that he had found God mainly through 
the sacred experiences which came to him as a 
husband and a father. Only by knowing something 
of the sacredness of human love had he been made 
able to realize the Divine love, and I fancy that to 
that man his home will always be more of a temple 
than his church. 

There are others for whom the influence of a 
great and noble building is quite sacramental. By 
the help of the subtle influences of such places they 
are lifted beyond all the things of sense and come to 
enjoy essential communion with God. I know at 
least one staunch Scottish Protestant for whom the 
Westminster Cathedral has a quite unique value as 



THE RESOURCES OF THE DISCIPLE 121 

a help to prayer. He is more distracted than helped 
by ritual, but a quiet vastness such as that great 
building now provides is of priceless use to him. 

Others, again, plainly find that ritual does help 
them. Alone and at home they have only faint 
experiences of God in prayer, but in His temples 
and while rich and ornate worship is offered by 
many persons they are lifted beyond themselves and 
find His face. To a great many that experience 
comes to its highest when they partake of the Com- 
munion. 

On the other hand, for people of a diflferent tem- 
perament buildings and ritual are quite indifferent 
matters. All that they need is some fellowship in 
prayer. Provided they can find some company of 
like-minded persons who will with them wait on 
God they are satisfied. Some of them confess that 
alone they remain spiritually impotent. Distracting 
thoughts and a sense of personal incompetence 
make their private devotions of little value. But 
common worship lifts them into Grod's presence, and 
they know Him for themselves though also in 
company with others. And there are still others 
who need nothing except quiet and solitude. A 
bare room, or a dugout, or a quiet corner in an 
empty and even ugly church is all that they need. 
With closed eyes and ears at rest they can get away 
from this world and pass into His presence w^ho 
soothes and restores and guides. No special 
postures help them. They ask only to be allowed 
such bodily positions as will enable them to forget 
the body. And at the opposite pole from them 



122 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

there are I think people to whom God is most real 
when they are in crowds. They find Him through 
humanity. When closely surrounded by His chil- 
dren they become aware of their Father in heaven. 
They could tell you of places in particular streets 
where they found Him and so attained to real 
prayer even amid the hum and dust of the traffic. 

These are at least a few of the ways in which 
men learn to pray. All of them, however, are 
secondary to the supreme way. "For this world 
the word of God is Christ." We cannot see God, 
V but "we see Jesus." In Jesus for the simplest God 
is made manifest. Through Jesus^ God becomes a 
real and knowable person. And therefore beyond 
all other ways Jesus is the way into a sense of 
God's presence. In other words, it is by thinking 
about Jesus that most people attain to a sense of 
God's reality. Apart from Him God remains to us 
so much of a mystery that it is hard to have any 
sense of His nearness. But in Jesus men saw and 
handled the word of life. By fellowship with Him 
they attained to fellowship with God. And so it 
is still. It may not seem so to those who have had 
no experience of the matter. They may be tempted 
to say they do not see how thinking about an histor- 
ical person can bring a present sense of God's near- 
ness and reality. But the answer to that is supplied 
by experience. As a matter of fact, thousands find 
that thought about Jesus does introduce them to the 
Divine presence. That is what they mean when 
they say in prayer that they approach God "through 
Christ." When this world seems to them merely 



THE RESOURCES OF THE DISCIPLE 123 

material, hard, and irresponsive, they go back in 
thought to that Ufe in which God was made mani- 
fest, and at once their spiritual natures are quick- 
ened so that they know themselves in the presence 
of their Father in heaven. 

Yes, Jesus is the way to the Father ; and though 
we may find that other means also help us to realize 
God, yet even with them it is probable that the very 
content we put into the word *'God'' is supplied by 
the historical Jesus. When men stand alone before 
the face of nature and are moved to their depths by 
the sense of the Divine presence, they probably read 
into nature more than is there. Their exaltation 
comes not merely from the sense of a presence, but 
from the sense that the presence which disturbs 
them is the one they know already through Jesus. 

The question of words will no doubt trouble 
some. Possibly many will be helped by using set 
forms of words, so long as they take care to put 
sincere meaning into them. Others may find that 
they do not need words. The Psalmists advise us 
at times to be "silent towards God." Others, again, 
will find their own words without difficulty. Once 
more let each of us find out for ourselves what we 
need. The matter is worth a great deal of trouble. 
If we really want to help in building the Kingdom, 
we may even come to believe that it is of more 
importance thus to secure food for the soul, than 
to make certain of our daily meals. 

I would fain add a word of caution lest any of 
us disparage the means and methods of prayer 
which others use, but which do not happen to help 



124 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

us, or be necessary to us. Those who do not get 
help through church services are apt to be scornful 
of those who do. Those who get their help through 
church worship are apt to assume that all others 
ought to get their help in the same way. **True 
worshippers must worship the Father in spirit and 
in truth/' That was Christ's final word about it. 
He did not care whether men worshipped at Jeru- 
salem, or "in this mountain." One thing only is 
necessary and that to find Him, It would make 
' greatly for religious peace in this country if we all 
learnt to rejoice when we hear of others finding 
God in any way, and ceased to insist that our way is 
the best. Some indeed insist that their way is the 
only way. We cannot be too insistent about the 
necessity of prayer. But we cannot be too catholic 
in our appreciation of the manifold forms and ways 
in which prayer is achieved. 

The other great resource of a Christian disciple 
< is to be found in other people. To use the common 
master word of our day, it is to be found in fellow- 
ship. We are so made that we need each other in 
all departments of life, and supremely in this one. 
We can and do mediate God to one another. By 
fellowship we rise to experiences which are im- 
possible otherwise. 

This does not merely mean fellowship with liv- 
ing contemporaries. The greatest spirits of all 
history still offer us their fellowship with royal 
generosity through their books. All who have lived 
lives of real discipleship — all who have had real 



THE RESOURCES OF THE DISCIPLE 125 

experience of the Christian way — all who have 
conquered and many who have largely failed, still 
offer us help beyond all price by what they have 
put of themselves into their writings. Along this 
way, they declare, we found life: along that one we 
found death. By many a sorrow and many a failure, 
as well as by many a triumphant success, they have 
accumulated a store of wisdom which they share 
with us freely. 

It is thus that the reading of the Bible comes to *^ 
have such a central place in the disciple's life. He 
will of necessity read much and often in the gospels 
that he may increasingly know the mind of iisj-ord. 
But he will also read what Christ's great followers 
have to say about the Christian way, and he will 
draw from them both knowledge and inspiration. 
Possibly the reading of the Bible has come to seem 
to many a mere duty which they have been taught 
to perform, but which brings no real stimulus to 
their minds. But that is because it has been read 
merely as a duty, and perhaps in a rather mechan- 
ical way. Once we have learnt to feel in it the 
living beat of actual human lives, and to realize 
that these men were *'up against'' a world very like 
ours, we shall discover a new reality in it, and there- 
fore a new interest. 

But it is not only the men of the Bible who have 
living things to say to us about the Christian way. 
In addition to them there stands near to us a great 
host of men and women, not dead but merely out 
of sight, who offer us still their fellowship, and 
who have great experiences to share with us. 



126 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

Not only Paul, and John, and Peter, but also 
Augustine and Francis, and Thomas a Kempis — 
Luther and Bunyan, and Brother Lawrence — 
Wesley, and Woolman, and William Penn — Lincoln, 
and Livingstone, and Shaftesbury, and so on 
through all the ranks of that great and varied com- 
pany who have loved the same Lord, and helped in 
the building of His Kingdom. These people make 
the great cloud of witnesses who still with sympathy 
and understanding watch the runners of today. He 
is no wise man who rejects their company and 
remains ignorant of all they have to teach. And 
their company is always available. Living souls 
who help us may at times be inaccessible, but every- 
where and always these great and humble souls wait 
upon us. Through the literature of Christendom 
they are all within reach. We may pick and choose 
for ourselves. No two of us will select the same 
special persons. But each of us may, if we will, 
hold converse with some chosen band of great fore- 
runners who are able to cheer our despair, resolve 
many of our perplexities, and sustain us amid the 
ardours of the narrow way. And that is beyond all 
question one of the great resources of the disciple. 

Then there remain the other living people who 
are going the same way — in other words, the fellow- 
ship of other disciples is almost always available. 
It is difficult to overestimate the help that they are 
able to aiford. Absolute statements are perhaps 
very seldom true ones, and there possibly are excep- 
tional people who travel wonderfully on the Chris- 
tian way though they seek no fellowship with others. 



THE RESOURCES OF THE DISCIPLE 127 

They live apart and yet serve greatly. But they are 
the few and the peculiar. For the great mass of 
people a life of discipleship is well nigh impossible 
except in fellowship. It is one of the deepest of 
our instincts to seek the company of others when 
specially hard things have to be done. And dis- 
cipleship always means specially hard things. Just 
as the other men in his platoon became for many a 
soldier the power that carried him through the 
terrors and abominations of the front, so in the 
Christian warfare it is the inspiration of the com- 
pany of other soldiers that makes the campaign a 
possibility. 

To begin with, we need others for the enrich- 
ment and correction of our thinking about Christian ^ 
issues. No one man ever saw all sides of truth. 
Perhaps no company of people can see all sides of 
it. But they can at least see a great many more 
than any individual. Probably we are only now 
beginning to discover all the value that there is in 
corporate thinking. What really explains the recent 
multiplication of conferences of many kinds is just 
the fact that when a number of people in any truly 
intimate way set themselves to seek after truth, 
they help each other to a larger view of it than is 
possible in any other way. When men and women, 
of various ages and of various types, all alike con- 
tribute what they know to a sincere discussion, the 
result is often a very rich one. One by one we are 
a prey to our own prejudices. Together we may 
surmount them if we will. It is the peculiar snare 
of deeply religious persons, to which perhaps the 



128 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

most earnest are most exposed, that they should 
think that all religious experience ought to be of the 
same type as their own, and that all people ought 
to see truth as they see it. But such private obses- 
sions become impossible when men and women find 
themselves in the company of others whose spiritual 
power is beyond all question, but whose convictions 
and experiences vary widely. 

Then, further, most men find in time that they 
need the stimulus which comes to them from the 
faith and courage of others, and are immensely 
strengthened by association with those who are also 
trying to attain to discipleship. It is one thing to 
resolve to let all else go and follow the way of the 
Kingdom, but it is quite another to maintain that 
resolve amid *'the coiled perplexities'' of our com- 
plicated modern life, and when subjected to all the 
strains for heart and head which belong to any 
modern calling. There are few who are not at 
times tempted to give in, and fewer still who do 
not find that their courage sometimes flags. At 
times it seems difficult to be even interested in the 
things we had meant to care about always. A 
certain paralysis of feeling is apt to descend upon 
us, and all the glow seems to go out of our beliefs 
and purposes. The case for cynicism will seem 
very strong, and the case for an easy-going attitude 
to life stronger still. 

And then it is that through the fellowship of 
our fellow travellers the greatest of boons may 
come to us. As they allow us to share their life, 
new life seems to flow into us. By the influence of 



THE RESOURCES OF THE DISCIPLE 129 

one belief is made clear again. Another seems able 
almost to bestow courage, and a third helps us to 
realize the presence of God once more. Men who 
had been feeling that they could not pray, find 
themselves able to pray as the opportunity comes to 
them to be uplifted by the prayers of others. Men 
who had felt utterly drained of all enthusiasm find 
their empty beings filled when subjected to the 
contagion of the keenness of others. And so in the 
spiritual world we help each other up steep and 
slippery places, and find life growing richer and 
fuller as we give and take in the interchange of 
common life. I do not think that mere fellowship 
with others can ever take the place of those quiet 
hours of solitude in which a man must face his 
God, and get back at all costs to sincerity and 
reality. I think there is an inner chamber in every 
life into which no others ought to enter. There 
are reserves of the soul to maintain which belongs 
to spiritual chastity. And no doubt there is a danger 
that men may try to live exclusively on fellowship 
and delude themselves into supposing they believe 
and feel when they are really only handling the 
convictions and feelings of others at second hand. 
Fellowship has its dangers as all other good things 
have. He who only realizes God when he is with 
others who have done it first, might do well to 
doubt whether he has yet found God. Thousands 
of people have probably ere this lived all their lives 
upon the emotions which church produced in them 
without having any sincere religion that was truly 
their own. **It is a sad reflection,'' says Penn, "that 



130 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

many men have no religion, and that most men 
have none of their own/' Seeing which it is not 
to be wondered at that Penn should coimsel us to 
seek the fruits of solitude. It is well after having 
shared in the reUgious activities of a group to ask 
oneself whether one has really any truly personal 
faith. 

And yet all that admitted, it remains true that 
fellowship is one of the main ways in which the 
grace of God is ministered and mediated to us, and 
no man who really means to be a disciple can afford 
to live spiritually alone. 

And thirdly, it is surely plain that we need 
others if ever we are to take an effective share in 
the practical labours which the building of the 
Kingdom involves. The great tasks of reconstruc- 
tion which now await us are all of them such as can 
only be achieved by numbers of men and women 
working in concert. They defy the isolated indi- 
vidual. In order to count a man must get into his 
place in the body of Christ. Just as a great build- 
ing requires architects, and measurers, and labour- 
ers and skilled tradesmen of a score of different 
sorts and is a flat impossibility either to the indi- 
vidual or to a disunited mass of workers, so in the 
building of the Kingdom unless we work with 
others, and according to some concerted scheme, we 
can achieve nothing. That, at least, is so plain that 
I need not elaborate it further. 

It is all these facts that justify the statement 
that a real Christian life cannot be an individual 
thing. It is essentially and necessarily a social 



THE RESOURCES OF THE DISCIPLE 131 

thing. We must advance together or not at all. 
All the great Christian acts are social acts. We 
pray to our Father. It is our daily bread for which 
we ask. It is our sins that we present to God for 
forgiveness. It is for each other that we break the 
bread in the central sacrament of our faith. St. 
Paul has expressed this by saying that a member 
of the body separate from the body is a useless 
thing. The life of a Christian is like the life of a 
hand or a foot. It depends vitally on the life of the 
whole organism to which it belongs. 

Another way of saying this is to say that Church 
is unalterably and eternally necessary to those who 
would fain be disciples. The Church came into 
existence because men and women who wanted to 
follow Christ found that they needs must hold to- 
gether, and thus they made the Church by in- 
evitable instinct. The Church came into being just 
because there were would-be Christians in the world. 
And the Church will always come into being when- 
ever and wherever there are would-be Chris- 
tians in the world. Were all the existing churches 
destroyed tomorrow others would spring into being 
at once, unless all Christians had been destroyed 
too, and, indeed, unless the spirit of Christ should 
cease to call men and women unto Him. 

But when I say the Church, I mean just and 
only companies of would-be followers. When I 
say that a man must join a church to live a Christian 
life, I mean only that he must get into fellowship 
with others, few or many, of like mind with him- 
self. I do not mean that he either should or can 



132 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

find the great essential help in any particular church. 
Here, again, all the infinite varieties of human 
nature must be remembered, and just as men differ 
widely in the matter of prayer — some requiring this 
kind of help and some another, so also in this matter 
of Church. The real Church universal presents 
itself to men today in a vast variety of differing 
forms. Some will be at home in one chamber of 
that vast building, and some in another. The differ- 
ing forms of the Church really constitute its wealth. 
To force all men into churches of one uniform 
pattern would be like putting them into straight 
jackets, in which the majority of them would perish. 
The God who designed our rich humanity, which 
manifests itself in such uncounted variations of 
type, must also have designed that the churches 
which His children should form would also be 
almost infinite in variety. 

And yet this also is true, that a clique can never 
be a church. An exclusive group can never be a 
church, any more than an exclusive spirit can be a 
Christian. People may draw together by irresistible 
affinity, but unless they maintain an attitude of great 
hospitality towards all others they will find that 
Christ is no longer dwelling with them. He will go 
to any place which is free to all His brethren, but 
He will go to no abode that shuts Him off from the 
common life of humanity. As we seek after a 
fellowship that may help us in the difficulties of 
personal living, we are all tempted to be both very 
critical and very sensitive. We do not like this 
church because the people seem cold, or that one 



THE RESOURCES OF THE DISCIPLE 133 

because the people are demonstrative, or another 
because the people seem to us ignorant. But it 
would be well to ask ourselves at such times whether 
we have really ever discovered our brethren, and 
are really willing to belong loyally to the great 
family of God. They must have been a very rough, 
noisy, and ignorant band who first surrounded 
Jesus, and those who would not mingle with that 
band never got near Him. The wise and the 
mighty of this world have seldom cared truly about 
Him. His people have generally seemed without 
honour and without distinction. He loved the 
people so much that those who cannot love the 
people disagree with Him. Perhaps the great first 
lesson which confronts many of us is, then, just a 
lesson in learning to appreciate the very people with 
whom Christ lived and for whom He died. And 
when that lesson has been learnt the difficulty of 
finding "a church that suits us'' may be found to 
have disappeared. He who really loves his neigh- 
bour will never feel uncomfortable in his neigh- 
bour's church. Church was never meant to soothe 
our aesthetic sensibilities, or to conform to our in- 
stincts of social exclusiveness. It is designed to 
offer us an opportunity of honest fellowship with 
other people who are going our way in the spiritual 
life. Unless we will march with the army we can- 
not march at all. 

What I have been trying to say in this chapter is 
just that the resources of a disciple are to be found 
partly in God and partly in his fellow-men. They 
are found in God when He is realized through 



134 THE CHRISTIAN ADVENTURE 

prayer, and they are found in our fellow-men when 
we achieve any fellowship with them that is honest 
and warm-hearted. And these two essential re- 
sources are not in the last resort two but one. The 
nearer we get to God the more truly are we inclined 
to, and fitted for, fellowship with others. And the 
more real our fellowship with others, the more 
intense will our love and loyalty to God become. 

*'If we walk in the light . . • we have fellow- 
ship one with another.*' 

"If a man love not his brother whom he hath 
seen, he cannot love God whom he hath not seen." 



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